Every Dog Has Its Day: 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' Teases Possible Villain For The Sequel

While we are definitely caught in the web of excitement surrounding the #MCU's #SpiderManHomecoming, some fans of the lycra lad are already looking ahead to #TomHolland's future installments in the title role. We love a good Easter Egg hunt, and now the official Homecoming app has given us a doozy about its equally anticipated sequel; so, have we been introduced to the next film's villain before the first film has even hit theaters?

Only recently, Holland confirmed that Homecoming is just the start of a standalone trilogy for our wall-crawler, and while fate hopefully won't take it down Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 road of villain overload, the app does excitedly tease a whole host of possibilities. With a presumed two-year (ish) gap between films, audiences really will get to grow up with Peter Parker and the heroes/villains around him.

'Jackal' Do Nicely

So, what about this big reveal? Away from generic pictures of seeing our cast sharing selfies and the normal stuff you would find on a teenage boy's phone, redditor JakeM917 found something lurking in the bowels of Peter's phone:

It may look like an innocuous text with some millennial chatter between our titular hero and BFF Ned Leeds, but away from the grumpy emoji, there is a key name-drop. For those who haven't read Marvel's comic books, the surname Warren could mean big trouble for our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Orange Is the New Black actress Selenis Leyva will play pick up some textbooks to play Peter's high school teacher Mrs. Warren, but could she or someone around her take on the iconic villain mantle of the Jackal? First introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man #31, Miles Warren was the man who first played the professor-cum-supervillain. As a professor of biology at the university, Warren became obsessed with Gwen Stacy and took a turn to the dark side after her death at the hands of the Green Goblin. While all of this sounds a long way off in the Holland era, it would make sense to start laying the groundwork now.

Interestingly and coincidentally, Warren had a brother named Raymond, who was a science teacher at Peter's high school. Given that Levya's part is still credited, we can assume that she will have a small speaking role in Homecoming. While the high school setting would make sense for Levya to be "Raymona" Warren, she could also fill the role of Miles's wife from the comic books, however, there is an even more interesting opportunity just on the horizon.

Sure, Mrs. Warren promises to be a small pat (so far), but if she returned in a sequel, why not have a gender-flipped villainess and have Leyva take on the Miles Warren storyline? It would certainly mess with the expectations of audiences, and thanks to this year's Thor: Ragnarok, we know the MCU isn't afraid to give us a powerful vixen of villainy at its core. All of this is just a thought and is pretty sure to not even be alluded to in Homecoming, but it is a thought nonetheless.

Too Many Villains Spoil The Broth

Holland's first entry already has the Tinkerer, Shocker, and #MichaelKeaton's Vulture as the Big Bad, so we will have to see how the villains interlock or if it is a case of Spider-Man 3 déjà vu. If Marvel can continue to juggle multiple villains, a'la Civil War, it could set the precedent to introduce Jackal and expand the Spideryverse beyond tired staples like the Osborns and Green Goblin.

There is no doubt that Doctor Octopus, Rhino, and Electro are all big parts of Peter Parker's life, but it might be constructive to move away from the more classic iterations of the Sinister Six and give us someone we haven't seen in live action before. Any form of Warren/Jackal only has loose ties to the Big Bad of villains, appearing in holographic form in the Sinister Sixty-Six, so why wouldn't we go for a left-field approach? Vulture was an unusual choice to start the rebooted reboot series rolling, but it could be one that pays off against the CGI mess and underwhelming foes that Peter largely faced under Maguire and Garfield.

Giving us the youngest iteration of the character to grace theaters, director #JonWatts is also giving us more opportunities to delve deeper into the #comicbook lore of the character to introduce a whole host of new or familiar faces. A bit like Dr. Kirk Langstrom/Man-Bat from Batman, Warren/Jackal would be an underrated fan-favorite to find his (or her) way clawing into a darker era of Marvel's plucky Parker playtime.