No Marvel hero has been adapted for theaters as often as Spider-Man. Between Sam Raimi’s trilogy, the Andrew Garfield reboot, and Tom Holland’s run in the MCU, the wall-crawler has racked up nine live-action theatrical outings, and that’s before counting the animated Spider-Verse films. Across all of them, the character has worked through most of his rogue’s gallery, with Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Rhino, Sandman, the Lizard, Electro, Vulture, Mysterio, and Kingpin all getting the big-screen treatment, several of them more than once. Sony pushed the villain pipeline even further with its own Spider-Man Universe, building their own versions of Venom (Tom Hardy), Morbius (Jared Leto), and Kraven the Hunter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), all headlining their own films without Spider-Man in the room.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which opened last Friday under director Destin Daniel Cretton, kept the expansion going with a rapid-fire opening montage that finally put Tarantula, Boomerang (Aidan Kennedy), Ramrod (Billy Clements), and Tombstone (Marvin Jones III) on screen, alongside Mac Gargan’s (Michael Mando) full transformation into Scorpion. However, even with that roster growing this year, a handful of genuinely iconic Spider-Man villains have yet to show up in a single movie.
Marv Wolfman conceived Black Cat as a noir mystery villainess for Spider-Woman #9’s cover, borrowing the premise from the 1949 Tex Avery cartoon Bad Luck Blackie. He brought the character instead to The Amazing Spider-Man #194 in July 1979, where Dave Cockrum redesigned her into Felicia Hardy, daughter of master thief Walter Hardy. Felicia’s first act in costume was breaking her dying father out of prison, a heist that put her in Spider-Man’s path and launched one of the character’s longest romantic entanglements. Her bad luck power came later, as part of a deal with Wilson Fisk.
Felicity Jones played a character named Felicia in 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, an Oscorp employee, but the film never confirmed her as Walter Hardy’s daughter and never put her in a costume. That means the actual Black Cat, a cat burglar’s daughter and probability-warping thief, has never appeared in a Spider-Man theatrical release. The character came closest to theaters in 2017, when Gina Prince-Bythewood signed on to direct Silver & Black, a Sony film pairing Felicia Hardy with mercenary Silver Sable, slated for February 2019 with both characters’ costumes already designed. Script delays sank the project in August 2018, and Sony’s plan to salvage it into two solo films, Black Cat first, never advanced past the announcement.
Dan Slott and Phil Jimenez introduced Mister Negative in Free Comic Book Day: The Amazing Spider-Man #1 in May 2007, months before the character became a driving force of the yearlong “Brand New Day” arc that ran through The Amazing Spider-Man in 2008. It’s curious that Spider-Man: Brand New Day borrowed its title directly from the same comic book era that gave Mister Negative his biggest spotlight, yet the film chose Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) as its antagonist instead.
In the comics, Martin Li runs FEAST, a homeless shelter he founded as a genuine act of philanthropy, while secretly commanding the Inner Demons gang as Mister Negative. The character’s body and clothing are inverted like a photographic negative through Darkforce energy every time he shifts his persona, and his touch can push a person toward the extreme opposite of their own morality. Mister Negative was one of two primary antagonists in Insomniac’s 2018 Marvel’s Spider-Man, a video game that has given Mister Negative broader recognition, even though he has never been featured in a movie.
Gerry Conway and Steve Ditko introduced Miles Warren as an ordinary Empire State University biology professor in The Amazing Spider-Man #31 in December 1965, nearly a decade before Conway and artist Gil Kane transformed him into the Jackal in issue #129. Gwen Stacy’s death at Norman Osborn’s hands was the catalyst for the change, pushing Warren, who had nursed an unhealthy obsession with his own student, to blame Peter Parker and pursue revenge through the genetics lab he ran at ESU. That revenge took the shape of cloning technology, and in October 1975’s Amazing Spider-Man #149, Warren unveiled a clone of Peter Parker that appeared to die in the same issue, only to resurface in 1994 as Ben Reilly, who spent years as the Scarlet Spider and eventually wore Spider-Man’s own costume during the 1990s Clone Saga.
Ben Reilly’s turn as Spider-Man shaped him into a recurring ally and sometimes antagonist to Peter Parker. Kaine Parker, an earlier and more unstable Warren clone, went on to anchor his own ongoing Scarlet Spider series starting in 2012, in addition to appearing as a villain himself. Warren’s experiments were also revived twice decades later to drive the 2011 miniseries Spider-Island and 2016’s The Clone Conspiracy. Despite his importance for the hero’smythology and for many of Peter’s recurring allies, the Jackal was never in a single Spider-Man movie.
