After a sterling first solo outing in the MCU with Spider-Man: Homecoming, Tom Holland’s webslinger is next scheduled to do battle alongside Marvel’s greatest heroes in Avengers: Infinity War. It sounds as if he’s going to swing out of that apocalypse relatively unscathed as well, as Marvel and Sony have already confirmed that we’re going to see a Spider-Man: Homecoming 2. Not only that, but the sequel may also herald the return of a villain from the first film.
Thanks to the special features on the digital release of Homecoming, we have a hint as to which antagonist may be back for more. This comes courtesy of the film’s co-producer, Eric Hauserman Carroll, who speaks on a feature titled Aftermath and said the following:
Going forward, we’re going to have this new expanded view of the universe, We’re going to have this new perspective on the MCU. For example, at the end of the film, the Tinkerer is still at large. And of course, he’s the guy who actually builds all of this stuff. And he could probably come up again in future movies to give our guy a hard time.
You’ll remember that the Tinkerer, played by Michael Chernus, was working with Michael Keaton’s Vulture on weaponizing the abandoned alien tech that rained down on New York after The Avengers. But while The Vulture ended up in jail at the end of the movie, the Tinkerer escaped to tinker to his heart’s content. As such, who knows what diabolical schemes he’s up to?
Let’s face it, it’d be a bit of a climb-down for Spider-Man to go from squaring off with Thanos to facing down some pudgy guy in a badly fitted jacket with a silly name, so we can safely assume that some other, higher profile baddie will be the main antagonist in Spider-Man: Homecoming 2. Perhaps Scorpion?
That said, a guy with the skills to retrofit whatever weird tech comes his way sounds like he could be pretty damn useful in a post-Infinity War MCU, especially considering the rumbles we’ve heard of its cataclysmic plot.