Director Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man is primed for a big Fourth of July weekend opening, but that doesn’t stop him from thinking ahead.  In a recent interview, Webb talked about potential sequels for the superhero film, saying that he departed from canon just enough to allow successive iterations to “withstand…[and] anticipate future storylines.”  Who does Webb think would be a good villain for Spidey in the future?  Well, he does stress that Spider-Man already has an impressive rogues gallery, but also suggested an original villain of his own creation.  You can find out who that would be after the jump.

The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Martin Sheen, Sally Field and Denis Leary opens July 3rd.

Check out the new posters below and click on them to embiggen (via IMPAwards).  In an interview with Heat Vision, Webb suggested the following villain for an eventual sequel to The Amazing Spider-Man:

“I do think it would be tricky to totally invent a major villain, but if I did that it would be The Mime.  My big contribution would be a villain called The Mime. That’s a joke, by the way. A joke.”

In case you didn’t hear him, Webb is joking, so don’t get your Spidey-tighties in a bunch.  He went on to further comment on classic Spider-Man villains:

“I think you have to be pretty protective of the canon when it comes to villains.  And Spider-Man has a great rogue’s gallery, so there’s a lot to choose from.”

Whether Webb will be around to direct a sequel or not depends on a lot of variables, but he did seem content with the world he set up in the rebooted origin story:

“I wanted to create a universe that works in and of itself for one movie, but I wanted to create a universe that not only can withstand but anticipate future storylines.  Movies like this tend to have sequels, [although] ultimately the audience will tell us if they want one. But I kind of thought it was an interesting thing to anticipate those storylines and think about the back stories and how we can parlay those into an ongoing story.”

He concluded by comparing his work in preparing the film for future interpretations to that of serialized comic books:

“That’s something I love about the comics — the serialized nature of them.  And then certain storylines we’ll pick up and characters that we’ll expand upon, but it’s all part of the mythology that we spent a lot of time developing early on.  I think there’s obligations to canon that were fun to explore, but the future is bright,” he says. “I think there’s a lot of possibility there.”

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