This past Sunday, an eagle-eyed Twitter user named Jeser Piedra snapped the following photo of a promo banner for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which depicts a much broader threat than Jamie Foxx‘s villain Electro:

Intriguingly, Foxx’s character, who has been touted about as the sequel’s primary villain, is pushed to the  far right of the poster to share space with Rhino (Left) and an heretofore unmentioned Goblin villain (Center). As far as I can tell, this is the first official promo showing Rhino and the new Goblin in full view.

As expected, Rhino has been kept in line with the Ultimate Spider-Man series, opting for a man inside a mechanical suit rather than a giant grey Pachyderm with a human face. It’s a much better fit for the grounded movies and the design actually does look somewhat interesting.

The juicy part, however, is this new Goblin who hadn’t been officially confirmed as appearing in the second movie. While we’ve known Chris Cooper and Dane Dehaan would be playing Norman and Harry Osborn respectively, we’ve heard no mention of a Goblin transformation taking place so early in the new franchise. On top of that, a second Twitter user going by the handle Tupacca zoomed in and unveiled a closer look at the villain:

..And it’s pretty clearly not Chris Cooper on the glider. This would seem to indicate that Amazing Spider-Man 2 will do away with Norman’s role in the Goblin story and make Harry the Green Goblin from the beginning. It’s not much of a blasphemous change in my book, although it will be interesting to see how, if this is the case, they handle Harry’s evil motivations. 

On another note it’s hard to tell from the grainy photo if this version of the Goblin succumbs to any real physical mutations, or, like the original film trilogy, it’ll just be  a guy in a suit. Personally I thought Willem Dafoe’s Gobby was as good as you can do with the character in live-action, though I much prefer the flesh Goblin (New nickname for my junk!) from Spider-Man of yore. The image above also bears a striking resemblance to James Franco’s Harry Osborn in Spider-Man 3, but again, I can’t think of how else you could handle the translation without it looking goofy. Although…

Finally, let’s go back to the character placement in the banner. Screen Crush makes a good point in directing attention to the tagline, “His Greatest Battle Begins”. The poster seems to be a pretty strong push toward the eventual Sinister Six, and with the success of Marvel’s team-ups and criss-crossing story lines we now know it can be done. However director Marc Webb’s biggest challenge will be continuing to attempt a believable interpretation of some of the most cheesy villains in all of comics. Spider-Man is a great character but for the most part, his villains are incredibly dumb — There’s a wonderful opportunity with Mysterio for some mind-bending, hallucinogenic inward-facing madness, but good luck to anyone trying to convince me to fear Kraven the Hunter.