Including B-list Spidey villains Hydro-Man and Molten Man in Spider-Man: Far From Home allowed director Jon Watts to up the action while highlighting lesser-seen foes from the superhero’s expansive rogues gallery.
“I’ve always loved Hydro-Man and Molten Man and his ability to have a giant, elemental kind of creature for Spider-Man to fight against,” Watts told io9. “Anything that makes things more difficult for him and opens up visual opportunities for me, I’ll run at bat.”
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The comic book villains make their big screen and Marvel Cinematic Universe debut reimagined as seemingly mindless elemental creatures purportedly from a parallel dimension.
In Marvel Comics lore, Hydro-Man is Morris Bench, a ship crewman-turned-superpowered crook who possesses exact control of the water now comprising his entire body. Molten Man, seen in Far From Home as a fiery, lava-dripping monster, is in the books Mark Raxton, a scientist whose entire body becomes coated with a burning hot metal alloy that makes him a great threat to Spider-Man.
“There’s this other subset of Spider-Man villains that are awesome, and we’d love to bring to the big screen, but it seems like maybe a whole movie about Hydro-Man might not be the way to go,” producer Eric Carroll said.
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) first encounters Hydro-Man when vacationing in Venice, Italy, where he’s armed only with web-shooters when tasked with halting the liquid monster without exposing his secret identity.
“So he’s watching all of this, deciding what to do—he’s on vacation, he’s not wearing his red and blue suit under this, he’s just got his web shooters with him,” Carroll said.
“He’s got to make a decision of whether he’s going to run into action and maybe risk his secret identity or not. And of course, he’s Peter Parker, so he does — he does this really cool parkour-y thing, running up on top of the Rialto Bridge… and gets clobbered.”
Hydro-Man and Molten Man supposedly hail from the same alternate Earth home to Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who just so happens to be the one defender best capable of defeating the creatures assaulting Europe.
“There are these threats to the world, the Elementals, elemental creatures. And Mysterio is someone who knows about them and wants to make sure that the world is safe from them,” Gyllenhaal said at Brazil’s CCXP in December when first revealing Mysterio enters the fray under spy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson).
“And Nick Fury asks him to come on and help because he’s the only one who really understands them. And then he teams up with friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and unfortunately has to make him become more than a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”
Starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Marisa Tomei, Jacob Batalon, Jon Favreau, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Samuel L. Jackson, Spider-Man: Far From Home opens July 2.
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