Venomous Claims Continue

Hey guys, it's Donnie...Say what you will, but Avi Arad is a goddamn genius.

By announcing that Thomas Hayden Church and Topher Grace will be playing the Spidey 3 villians but not announcing which villians they'll be portraying, Arad has created probably the biggest movie rumor mill on the internet, with the identity of the next James Bond a close second.

Aside from that brief claim of The Cameleon, a claim that I never even deemed serious enough to mention here before now, I think most people pretty much agree that Thomas Hayden Church will be playing Sandman, and the big mystery has been who Eric Foreman is gonna play. Quint at Ain't It Cool is pretty certain that it's gonna be Electro, while the rest of the people who give a carp (no, that's not a typo, some people are just generous with their fish) are still hoping that it will be Venom, despite minor details that would seem to point to the contrary, like when Sam Raimi repeatedly says things like "I've never really liked Venom," and "Venom will definitely not be the villian in Spider-Man 3."

Nonetheless, people still claim to have seen screen tests with black fabric and whatnot, so rumors persist. Freeze Dried Movies is now asserting that they have it from an anonymous source that the villians will be Sandman and Venom, with Harry becoming the Hobgoblin at the film's end. They claim that they've "confirmed this with various sources and apparantly it's quite well known." Look, it's certainly a possibility that Venom will make an appearance. A quick glance over at Wikipedia will tell you that there was a fairly important storyline which involved both Venom and Sandman, so it's certainly a possibility,

Personally, I don't really take this rumor as any more or less significant than the countless previous claims that "Venom is definitely in Spider-Man 3" and really what it comes down to is that there's no real solid, definitive evidence. Unless someone gets a hold of a picture of Topher Grace screen testing in a black jumpsuit with a large white spider on the front, we're not gonna know "definitely" what character he's playing until the powers that be at Marvel and Sony decide to tell us, which will most likely be at the pre-filming press conference sometime in November.

But please, by all means, continue to spread rumors and gossip. It's certainly entertaining.