Amazing Spider-Man 2 Star: Sony “Never Talked to Me” About Sinister Six Spinoff

Sony’s Sinister Six may have charged ahead without one member: the Rhino. After rebooting the wall-crawler in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, Sony Pictures plotted a Spider-Man universe with plans for a solo Venom movie and a Sinister Six spinoff to follow 2014’s Amazing Spider-Man 2. The sequel — which pit Spidey (Andrew Garfield) against supervillains Electro (Jamie Foxx), Green Goblin (Dane DeHaan), and Rhino (Paul Giamatti) — ended with a credits sequence that suggested Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, and the Vulture would complete the lineup of Spider-Man villains.

But in a new interview, Giamatti says Sony never approached him about reprising his role as Russian gangster Aleksei Sytsevich, whose rampaging Rhino is apprehended at the end of Amazing Spider-Man 2. 

“No idea. No,” Giamatti said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast when asked if he was in talks for Sinister Six. “They never talked to me about any of that stuff. Not that I remember.” 

The Academy Award nominee was just coming off a four-week run on Hamlet at Yale before going to play Rhino in the Amazing Spider-Man sequel, which Giamatti recalled was a “weird, surreal period of my life.” He added: “To me, it doesn’t get any better than to be able to do things the complete polar opposites of each other. If that’s happening, I’m happy as a clam.” 

There were rumors that Giamatti’s Rhino was among the multiversally-displaced supervillains set to appear in Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: No Way Home, which united Tom Holland, Tobey Maguire, and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men against villains from the previous Spider-Man movies: Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Doctor Octopus (Alfred Molina), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Electro (Foxx), and the Lizard (Rhys Ifans). Tom Hardy’s Venom made a cameo in the mid-credits sequence, but Rhino was only referenced when Garfield’s Peter 3 quipped that he fought “a Russian guy in a rhinoceros machine.”

“I have to admit, I have not followed all the Spider-Man movies. I shouldn’t be admitting this, but I haven’t followed it,” Giamatti said. “No, I think in the first place, the Rhino is a tricky one. Because if you really go Rhino, he’s wearing the Rhino suit with the horn and everything. I mean, hilarious. I kind of thought, ‘Are you going to do that? Am I going to look like a rhino with my face cut out?’ They didn’t do that, they went with the mechanical thing. But the Rhino might be a tricky one in the first place, I think.”

In 2013, Sony assembled a Spider-Man universe brain trust that included director Marc Webb, writers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, JeffPinkner, Ed Solomon, and Drew Goddard, and producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach. Plans included The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 4, Venom, and a Goddard-directed Sinister Six, once dated for November 11, 2016. Sony scuttled its world-building plans for an Amazing Spider-Man franchise expansion when the studio agreed to partner with Disney’s Marvel Studios and reboot Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; Venom eventually launched Sony’s Spider-Man Universe in 2018.

The studio is still planning Sinister Six, according to Spider-Man franchise producer Amy Pascal and Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group President Sanford Panitch. Potential members include Hardy’s Venom, Jared Leto’s Morbius, Michael Keaton’s Vulture, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven — who, as it turns out, will hunt Alessandro Nivola’s Rhino in Kraven the Hunter.