“[Molina was] one of my favorite people I’ve ever worked with,” lauds Holland of the returning Raimi Spider-Man movie alumnus. “It was really fun to watch him see how technology has advanced. When he was making these films, the arms were puppets, and when we did it, they’re all imaginary and CG. It was quite cool to see him relive it, but also relearn it.”
Molina’s Spider-Man 2 role as the iconic character often abbreviated as Doc Ock was the first—and thus far definitive—live-action rendition for one of the Wall-Crawler’s oldest top-tier archnemeses. It also happens to be widely regarded as one of the most powerful, humanistic villain roles in the history of comic book movies, thanks to Molina’s pathos-packed performance, boosted by a well-handled tragic backstory. Indeed, nuclear scientist Octavius—who’d become a mentor to the science-inclined Peter Parker—was experimenting with a fusion power source that would have changed the world, only to experience a destructive catastrophe that kills his beloved wife, and fuses a quartet of high-tech hazardous-waste-handling robot arms to his nervous system, creating a horrendous hybrid of a man with eight “arms” made insane by the evil tentacles.
In a less-mainstream-revered, pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe era for the genre, the role not only bestowed Molina with widespread acclaim, but earned him nominations with the MTV Movie + TV Awards, Teen Choice Awards, People’s Choice Awards, London Critics Circle Film Awards, Satellite Awards and more—yielding only one win, via the Visual Effects Society; a notion possibly attributed to the era. Nevertheless, the performance became the benchmark for big screen supervillains, one that even director Raimi himself attempted to recreate for 2007 follow-up Spider-Man 3 with the tragic backstory of Thomas Hayden Church’s Sandman, an accident-transformed, grain-manipulating supervillain—also revealed to be Uncle Ben’s real killer—whose criminal exploits turned out to be a benevolent fundraiser for his sick daughter. However, the pathos lightning failed to strike twice for Raimi, and that threequel ended up bogged down by an array of plot issues, notably its crowded cinematic clown car of disparate supervillains.
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Consequently, there is a widely-held belief speculating that this Doc Ock—and fellow returning other-iteration Spider-Man villains like Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Jamie Foxx’s Electro and Rhys Ifans’s Lizard—are variants (a concept recently introduced on the wild ride that was MCU series Loki,) from across the scattered Multiverse, adhering to what we now know to be the film’s central concept. This idea bestows Molina’s Doc Ock with completely new motivations, which will undoubtedly influence his performance this time around.
Molina’s aforementioned “Hello, Peter” line brings further intrigue when considering the possibility that—contrary to the way the clip was edited—he might not even be addressing Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, specifically. Indeed, collaborator studios Sony and Marvel are still clearly keeping certain elements about the film a secret, specifically about the enduring rumor that previous big screen Spider-Man portrayers, Tobey Maguire (from director Sam Raimi’s 2002-2007 Spider-Man Trilogy) and Andrew Garfield (from director Marc Webb’s 2012-2014 The Amazing Spider-Man duo) will appear in the film opposite Holland’s current Wall-Crawler for some live-action Spider-Verse pandemonium in this third Spider-Man film from director Jon Watts. Thusly, Molina’s Doc Ock—as a prospective variant who didn’t experience the redemption arc that cost his life—might just be addressing the only Peter Parker he knew, that being Maguire’s. That, of course, is an exciting reunion worth the price of admission in its own right.
