Sony’s expanding Spider-Man movie universe will soon include the long-awaited Sinister Six, and the famous villain team should once again include Spider-Man villains from the multiverse. The MCU’s successful Spider-Man: No Way Home featured the triumphant return of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s iterations of Peter Parker, as well as some of their respective villains. Although each of the villains were “cured” of their conditions at the end of the film, Sony can and should make use of the multiverse to bring back these iconic villains one more time in Sinister Six.
After interfering with Doctor Strange’s reality-altering spell, the multiverse is opened up in No Way Home, bringing five supervillains and their respective versions of Peter Parker from the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy or The Amazing Spider-Man duology into the MCU. In addition to giving Tom Holland’s version of Spider-Man his greatest challenge yet, the villains allowed actors like Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, and Jaime Foxx to reprise their roles, much to the delight of viewers. These performances appear to be the final hurrah for the villains, as they lose their powers and villainous tendencies before being sent back to their own timelines and universes.
Sony’s seemingly Spider-Man-free movie universe will eventually include a Sinister Six movie, presumably uniting six of Spider-Man’s greatest villains. While the Sony universe is gradually building its repertoire of reimagined Spider-Man villains, it’d be a smart and crowd-pleasing move to bring back Raimi and Amazing Spider-Man villains yet again for the team. Even though the villains of No Way Home were redeemed, the infinite multiverse would allow variants of the villains to join Sony’s universe without undoing their MCU endings.
As explained by The Ancient One in Avengers: Endgame, altering a timeline simply creates a new branching timeline, so while the Spider-Man villains in No Way Home were “cured” and sent back to their native realities no longer as villains, the mainstream Raimi and Amazing Spider-Man timelines still retain their original fates—which, in most cases, was death. If these villains are pulled out of their mainstream timeline yet again, they’d become variants who were never redeemed, allowing them to be villains once more without tarnishing No Way Home’s phenomenal ending.
Another option would be to simply have close-enough versions of the Raimi and Amazing Spider-Man villains already exist in Sony’s continuity. This appears to be the case for the Vulture, who will appear in Morbius with Michael Keaton reprising his role. Keaton of course played the character in Tom Holland's Spider-Man: Homecoming. Sony could simply have Dafoe, Molina, and Foxx play essentially the same characters who exist in a universe where they haven’t encountered any version of Spider-Man yet.
For many viewers and comic fans, actors like Dafoe, Molina, and Foxx played the definitive iterations of their respective villains, making it nearly impossible for another actor to play the role without being negatively compared to their predecessors. Moreover, there is considerable interest among viewers to see Maguire and Garfield return as their respective iterations of Spider-Man, so having the villains come back could be equally crowd-pleasing. The multiverse allows for infinite possibilities, so Sinister Six should take advantage of this and bring back Spider-Man’s most iconic cinematic villains once again.
