When talking about the baddies of Spider-Man: Far From Home it’s not rare to hear that the elementals look an awful lot like classic Spidey villains from the comics. Thus far, we lacked confirmation as to whether that was truly the inspiration, but a recent set visit interview with exceutive producer Eric Hauserman Carroll confirmed it to be the case.
When we took a step back and started talking about the characters we wanted to bring to the big screen this time around, we decided that there were two levels of Spider-Man villain,” Carroll explained. “The trademark of a great Spider-Man villain is his relationship to that villain. He has to have some deeply personal connection to that character, whether it’s the Osborns and being best friends, whether it’s what we did with Vulture in the last movie, we think that’s what makes one of these marquee Spider-Man villains. But there’s this other subset of Spider-Man villains that are awesome and we’d love to bring to the big screen, but it seems like maybe a whole movie about Hydro-Man might not be the way to go.
This logic makes a lot of sense. Spider-Man has arguably the greatest gallery of villains in the world of comic books, and it is simply impossible to turn all of them into A-level rogues for each movie. Making larger threats out of the ones who have some kind of direct connection to Peter makes a lot of sense from a narrative point of view.
We know the water elemental is based on Hydro-Man and the fire elemental is based on Molten Man. Who could be the inspiration for the other two? It is tempting to call that Flint Marko, AKA Sandman could be the idea behind the earth elemental. But what about the air one? It’s hard to think of a comic villain involving air. Maybe it’s Mysterio himself? He does have a history of dealing with gas and the trailers show his powers in a very gassy way. He does appear to be airborne a lot of the time, an ability someone who deals with air would definitely have.
About the challenge that these elementals will present to Peter, Carroll went on:
[Spidey] can’t web this guy. He can’t punch this guy. So how does he beat this guy? He has to use his real superpower, which is his genius-level intellect. So we thought that was a really fun ‘in’ here, to take these characters that keep putting Spider-Man in interesting positions where we guarantee ourselves it’s not going to be just two guys punching each other until one guy passes out. The idea of bringing these four Elemental creatures together is something we got excited about, and we get to play with these characters who would probably never get brought to the big screen in any other way.
It is also an intelligent decision to take Peter out of his comfort zone and bring villains that are harder to beat using simply his physical abilities. How he does that, we’ll have to wait till July 2nd to find out.
Source: Slashfilm
