Spider-Man: Homecoming Rumor

Image Courtesy www.superherohype.com

So here is a surprising bit of Spider-Man: Homecoming news that I kind of passed over in putting together today’s Weekly MCU Review:  A cast sheet for the movie was posted on Twitter and then captured on Reddit before the Marvel S.W.A.T. Team could take the leaker out.  Most of the characters are ones we already knew about, but there is one little surprise in there:  Tiffany Espensen is playing a character named Cindy, who is rumored to be...

(Possible Spoilers below)

...Cindy Moon, a.k.a. Silk.

I talked about Silk a while back, but here’s the quick summary of the character.

Cindy Moon is a classmate of Peter Parker who was bitten by the same radioactive spider that gave Peter his powers.  Cindy was found by a man named Ezekiel (who also has spider powers), who hides her away from the world for seven years and trains her to use her powers.  Peter finds her and frees her, at which point she decides to become a hero.  Her “silk-sense” is slightly better than Peter’s “spidey-sense,” and she produces her own webbing.

In looking back at that previous post, I had to chuckle at the following line:

While I doubt that Cindy Moon will get more than a cursory nod in the first MCU Spider-Man movie, it would not surprise me if the character reappears several movies down the line as another spider-powered hero.

Image Courtesy en.wikipedia.org

As I said then, I think it would be really cool if Marvel does decide to introduce Silk into the MCU in Spider-Man: Homecoming, though it is more likely that this will just give her a brief introduction before she really comes into her own 1 or 2 movies down the line.  With a back-story like “I was bitten by the same spider that bit you,” it would be really hard to incorporate her into the continuity later on if they haven’t laid some groundwork in the first one.  It’s the same concept as introducing Flash Thompson in this movie so that sometime down the line he can wear the Venom symbiote.

Introducing other Spider-heroes will be an excellent way for Marvel Studios and Sony to set this movie series apart from the previous two iterations, in which Spider-Man was the only hero present.  This time, not only does Spider-Man exist in the same universe with the Avengers, but he exists in a universe where other people have spider-based powers.

The focus of this movie needs to be on Peter Parker and how he adjusts with the new status quo:  he is a teenager in high school, his uncle was killed, he is a superhero/vigilante, and he is also working with Iron Man.  The other characters in the movie (especially those being set up for future appearances) need to be far enough in the background that they do not distract from Peter and his story.  Otherwise, this does run the risk of turning into another Spider-Man 3/The Amazing Spider-Man 2 disappointment.  But if it works, this could be the defining movie for Spider-Man, surpassing the first two Sam Raimi movies in the minds of the fans and jumpstarting a strong and multifaceted superhero (sub-) franchise for Sony at long last.  Hopefully Marvel knows what it is doing here.

Do you want to see Silk join the MCU in Spider-Man: Homecoming?  Do you think there is any weight to this rumor?  What other Spider-Verse characters do you want to see in the MCU?  Let me know in the comments!