Jamie Foxx to return as Electro in Spider-Man 3 opposite Tom Holland

In a bizarre turn of events, it sounds like Jamie Foxx, who played Electro in the last set of Spider-Man movies, will appear with Tom Holland in the third.

Let’s get the pun out of the way right here at the top: this news is shocking. The Hollywood Reporter has it that Jamie Foxx, who played the villain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 opposite Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man, is in “final talks” to reprise his role in an upcoming Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland.

This is surprising because it’s crossing the cinematic streams. Way back in the early 2000s, director Sam Raimi put out a trio of Spider-Man movies with Tobey Maguire in the lead role. After that ended, we got a couple of movies with Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man/Peter Parker. And now we’re in the middle of a run of films with Tom Holland, starting with Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017 and Spider-Man: Far From Home just last year. Each set of movies pretty much started the story anew, so to have Jamie Foxx’s Electro — a villain from the second set of movies — fight the Spider-Man from the third…it’s a little surreal.

That being said, this new set of movies has crossed the streams before. At the end of Far From Home, J.K. Simmons turned up as J. Jonah Jameson, Peter Parker’s irascible boss at The Daily Bugle…or at least that was his role in the MacGuire movies. The Holland films reimagined him an Alex Jones-like podcast provocateur, but bringing back Simmons is definitely a reference to the earlier movies, and it sounds like we’ll see him again.

However, Simmons was a beloved part of the first set of Spider-Man movies while Foxx was sort of a “meh” part of the second set, so bringing him back seems odd.

And it gets even weirder when you consider all the rights issues involved. You see, while Spider-Man is obviously a Marvel character, Marvel (and parent company Disney) don’t actually have the rights to make movies about him. Those rights belong to Sony, who did it without help for the first two sets of movies. However, after the Andrew Garfield movies underperformed, they agreed to work with Marvel on making the Tom Holland films, which are set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe even though Marvel didn’t technically make them. Essentially, Sony and Marvel are now sharing custody of the character. And all of that is plenty confusing enough without bringing in older incarnations of villains.

It’s also possible the third Spider-Man movie will involve some kind of multi-dimensional travel, with Holland’s Spider-Man visiting (or being visited by) people from another universe, including Foxx’s Electro. The MCU has been setting up this kind of multiverse concept for a while now. The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) talks about it often enough, and of course Avengers: Endgame was all about traveling to different realities via the Quantum Realm to grab Infinity Stones. In Spider-Man: Far From Home, the villain Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) claimed to be from another reality, and even though that was a ruse, the fact that everyone bought it tells you that such a thing is very possible.

We still don’t know what the new Spider-Man movie is called, although rumor has it that it could be Spider-Man: Homesick. Given the year we’re having, I prefer this:

Whatever it’s called, the next Spider-Man movie is due out on December 17, 2021.

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