The Sinister Six Was in Spider-Man: No Way Home
Just not all at the same time.
**OBVIOUS SPOILERS**
There is a lot of debate surrounding the exclusion of a sixth member of the infamous villain squad in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I’m here to put that to bed.
So in No Way Home, we got five villains from past movies all coming together. These were Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Electro, Sandman, and Lizard. I would have personally preferred some Rhino action in there as well, or even more of an exploration of any number of the villains we were introduced to in the Holland Trilogy, like Michael Mando’s Scorpion, Donald Glover’s Prowler, Bokeem Woodbine’s Shocker, or hell, even more of Michael Keaton’s Vulture.
While all of the actors playing these characters delivered amazing performances, there was always a dark shadow over my viewing of No Way Home. I kept saying to myself: “Where is the sixth villain? This is clearly the Sinister Six. Where’s number six?”
Naturally, I took to the Internet, where I discovered that everyone else familiar with the mythos felt the same way. We were obviously seeing the makings of a Sinister Six, but there were five villains. The numbers don’t add up.
Then it dawned on me.
There was a Sinister Six in No Way Home. It’s just that, while five of the members were alive or brought back to life, the sixth was dead the entire time. However, their influence was over the whole movie, and led to virtually everything that happened in it. This also happens to be remarkably in line with the character seen in the comics.
The sixth member is, was, Mysterio.
"Now hold up," you might be thinking. "Mysterio died. How is Mysterio in the Sinister Six?"
Mysterio is a master illusionist and special effects expert. In the comics, he is one of the original founders of the Sinister Six, and has a history of dying and resurrecting. Whether the resurrection is him, or a copy of him, is usually left to the writer. Regardless, it’s not out of character for Mysterio to continue influencing the story after death. This can be seen in Sandman’s Sinister Six, where Mysterio joins the fight as a different person after the original Mysterio committed suicide. Mysterio also reappears during The Gauntlet storyline, where he claims to be Quentin Beck and that he faked his own death.
This all means that the Mysterio of the MCU could easily follow comic book Mysterio’s legacy of post-mortem influence. In fact, he does, as seen by the effect his dramatic reveal of Spider-Man’s identity in Far From Home has on the whole story of No Way Home.
Without Mysterio revealing Spider-Man’s identity, Peter Parker would have never gone to Dr. Strange to fix his life. Peter would have never botched Dr. Strange’s spell, causing the multiverse to splinter and bring villains from other Spider-verses into his own. Without Mysterio, the other members of the Sinister Six would have never convened.
Mysterio is arguably their founder in the MCU, though he never could have guessed it. This is an ironic twist of circumstance, as Doc Ock — The Sinister Six’s classic founder — is both the first former villain we see and the first one to be cured of his villainy in No Way Home. In fact, we see that all of the multiversal spider-villains are cured of the qualities that made them villains, which leaves the future of the Sinister Six in question.
There’s no doubt that a setup like this, giving fans the closest we’ve seen to the Sinister Six onscreen since the teaser at the end of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2012) with no concrete delivery, would top the list of ultimate teases by a major motion picture studio. However, there is still hope on the horizon.
We know there's a Sinister Six movie gearing up for development. We know for certain that Sony and Marvel are moving forward with a Kraven the Hunter movie, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who also played Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron. This version of Kraven will most likely exist in Sony’s Spider-verse, which is increasingly putting its focus on the villains, but if No Way Home’s $1 billion box office is any indicator, Sony isn’t going to need much convincing to continue crossing over with the MCU. This isn’t even mentioning the end-credits scene in No Way Home, where Eddy Brock, played by Tom Hardy, leaves a sampling of symbiote in the MCU before being ethereally ejected back to his own universe, effectively setting up the appearance of Venom and other symbiotes in future MCU properties. Add to that the aforementioned four villains from the Holland Trilogy, as well as yet-unexplored villains from previous Spider-Man franchises, and that’s plenty of fodder for future setups of the Sinister Six.
On top of that, we know that Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire are BACK, and Garfield has expressed interest in returning to the web-slinger, so we might even get a Sinister Six solo with him in the suit.
Still, perhaps the biggest influence on the cinematic birth of the Sinister Six has little to no chance of returning to see it through. Mysterio successfully destroyed Peter Parker’s life by exposing his identity to the world, fracturing the multiverse, and sicking a quintuplet of inter-dimensional villains on Peter with the only hope of repairing the mess being a spell that would cause everyone to forget who Peter was — not just as Spider-Man, but completely. Mysterio’s actions left Peter with no identity, no one to remember him by, restarting his life from the ground up. The world from then on would only know Spider-Man, framed a villain, while Peter would go on as a ghost of his former self. Mysterio truly pulled the greatest trick ever pulled on the web-slinger.
But who knows? It wouldn’t be the first time the Man of Mystery rose from the dead.
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