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Read this over on /Film today. Don’t like the idea myself. Your thoughts?

Last we heard, Marc Webb was set to direct The Amazing Spider-Man 2 for Sony and Columbia, with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone returning as Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy, and Shailene Woodley set to play a young Mary Jane Watson.

And at that time, Electro was said to be the most likely villain for the film. (“Most likely” being deceptive wording, since the studio has a script from Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and Jeff Pinkner, with early work from James Vanderbilt, so there’s no doubt who the villain is.)

Now Electro is confirmed, and Jamie Foxx is in talks to play him.

Variety reports the news, and while the studio hasn’t confirmed Foxx’s role, other sources have told the trade that the actor would be Electro. More as we get it. Foxx himself said,

Dressed up as Electro for Halloween last night. Costume fits well.
— Jamie Foxx (@iamjamiefoxx) November 1, 2012

The mysterious, and seemingly half-baked post-credits scene in The Amazing Spider-Man featured a nameless figure (played by Michael Massee) who appeared before Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) in his prison cell. Thanks to the fact that an electrical discharge was part of the effects in the scene, many assumed that announced Electro — a classic Spidey villain, having first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man #9, in 1964 — as the baddie of the sequel. But Foxx is clearly not who was in the cell, adding to the notion that the post-credit scene was just kinda cobbled together. So will Sony digitally edit the end of the first movie to add Foxx to that scene?

Electro is the alter-ego of Maxwell Dillon, a lineman who was transformed into a mutated electrical capacitor by a freak lightning strike. Dillon realized that he could fire electrical blasts and manipulate electricity in other ways, and became a professional criminal. While the classic version of the character, designed by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, featured green tights with yellow accents and a pretty goofy mask, the Ultimate Spider-Man version is a little more sleek, without the exaggerated mask, and we can probably expect that to be more of a visual inspiration for this version of the character than anything else.