"Yeah, I think there are 2 kinds of origins to Eddie Brock. There’s one where he’s more of Peter’s peer which is ultimate Spiderman and there’s one that’s a little muddled it’s kind of told in the flashback which is the original origin. So I guess what I really brought to it was kind of a fear at the beginning that I shared with Sam which is I don’t think I’m the right guy to really play this role. In the original comic book he’s like 40 and really muscle-bound and I had to work out for 6 months. I could never get to where he was in the comic book but then what Sam described to me is he wanted to take the best of both worlds approach and kind of make him this evil twin brother of Peter Parker who’s basically a case study and if someone similar, you know if they have the same job and they’re after the same girl. Even Eddie kind of has the edge even though they’re similar. He’s a better dresser and clearly has more money and kind of a better flirt. If they both received the same power and one of those 2 people didn’t have someone like Uncle Ben like a mentor to say you have to take responsibility for this power how would that turn out? Even Peter used it for personal gain originally. What’s great about Eddie is that even though he’s really slick he kind of hides a really hollow interior. Like he’s got a really great exterior, he’s got nothing inside, whereas Peter’s just the opposite. He might not have his whole act together but his core is very strong and that’s why he’s able to kind of shed this power but Eddie totally embraces it."

""Spider-Man 3" is, in short, a mess. Too many villains, too many pale plot strands, too many romantic misunderstandings, too many conversations, too many street crowds looking high into the air and shouting "oooh!" this way, then swiveling and shouting "aaah!" that way. And saints deliver us from another dinner date like the one where Peter plans to propose to Mary Jane. You know a movie is in trouble when the climactic romantic scene of the entire series is stolen by the waiter (Bruce Campbell)."

"We know that Spider-Man's powers do not reside in his red suit, which lies in a suitcase under his bed. So how do fake Spideys like Venom gain their powers when they are covered with the black substance? And how does a microorganism from outer space know how to replicate the intricate patternwork of the Spidey costume, right down to the chest decoration? And to what purpose from an evolutionary point of view? And what good luck that the microorganism gets Peter's rival photographer, Eddie Grace, to infect, so that he becomes Venom! And how does Eddie know who he has become?"

"And what's with Mary Jane? Here's a beautiful, (somewhat) talented actress good enough to star in a Broadway musical, and she has to put up with being trapped in a taxi suspended 80 stories in the air by alien spider webs. The unique quality of the classic comic books was that their teenagers had ordinary adolescent angst and insecurity. But if you are still dangling in taxicabs at age 20, you're a slow learner. If there is a "Spider-Man 4" (and there will be), how about giving Peter and Mary Jane at least the emotional complexity of soap opera characters? If "Juno" (opening Dec. 14) met Peter Parker, she'd have him for breakfast. Superhero movies and Bond movies live and die by their villains. Spidey No. 2 had the superb Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), who is right up there with Goldfinger and the Joker in the Supervillain Hall of Infamy. He had a personality. In Spidey No. 3 we have too many villains, too little infamy. Take the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). As an escaped con and the murderer of Uncle Ben, he has marginal interest at best. As the Sandman, he is absurd. Recall Doc Ock climbing buildings with his fearsome mechanical tentacles and now look at this dust storm. He forms from heaps of sand into a creature that looks like a snowman left standing too late in the season. He can have holes blown into him with handguns, but then somehow regains the bodily integrity to hammer buildings. And how does he feel in there? Molina always let you know precisely how Doc Ock felt, with a vengeance."

"The great failing of "Spider-Man 3" is that it failed to distract me from what a sap Peter Parker is. It lingers so long over the dopey romance between Peter and the long-suffering Mary Jane that I found myself asking the question: Could a whole movie about the relationship between these two twentysomethings be made? And my answer was: No, because today's audiences would never accept a hero so clueless and a heroine so docile. And isn't it a little unusual to propose marriage after sharing only one kiss, and that one in the previous movie, and upside-down?"

"I think that Topher’s character is ultimately a very tragic character because when he hurls himself back just before the explosion I loved the way that he did that. It just gave me goose bumps. Topher just manages to capture in that one kind of flash of performance that this guy has nothing else. He’s only existed in the movie by superficiality and duplicity and then of course embraces the black suit and turns into Venom, but whenever he’s torn apart that’s all he has. He has no other choice, but to really commit himself suicidally because he just has nothing else. He has no other path. I find that to be resolute in it’s tragedy with it’s character. I think that my character certainly starts off in a place emotionally which addresses the worst fear of any parent, the possibility that you’ll lose your greatest gift which is your child. I’m a father and Sam is a father and Laura and Alvin are parents, Avi is a parent, everyone involved â€“ early on that’s what we wanted the anchoring of the character to be. It was that kind of impending tragedy with the character. You’re right though, he’s sympathetic and certainly some clicks beyond Eddie Brock and Venom, but I think that as Avi has said before there are no bad guys in these movies. They’re just people that this far into the series, I think, come into these movies with a value system in tact that’s corrupted by ambition or lust. In the case of Sandman he’s really corrupted by the ferocity of his own good intentions. You’ve got to pretty much figure that whenever I become a sand tornado and I’m spinning through the streets of Manhattan and flipping over cars some people probably got f**ked up. That’s probably a drag and they don’t care if my daughter is dying because their car got turned upside down, their Hyundai Excel. They don’t even see the hidden benefit that insurance pays and they get another car."

"Spider-Man 3 took a lot of flack - it was a bigger, more convoluted story with maybe one too many villains, and it went a bit dark for some. Still, for me, it's hard to put in words how delighted I was to watch Sam (Raimi), my boyhood buddy and filmmaking fraternal brother, direct one of the most successful movie franchises in history. There were superhero movies before Spider-Man, but Sam's series truly set that particular genre in motion for decades to come. I'm not a film historian, but I sense that Spider-Man also represents a turning of the tide, or taste, where even A-list movies are now B-movies conceptually. Believe me, if your hero is bitten by a radioactive spider and starts webslinging from buildings, that's not only a B-movie - that's a 1950s B-movie. I'm just happy that genre fare is no longer frowned upon in the world of entertainment, and that we're finally seeing how popular fantasy, horror and sci-fi stories really are."

"Every hero has a choice, to face the darkness... or be consumed by it."

"The battle within."

"How long can any man fight the darkness... before he finds it in himself?"

"End of the line, Spider-Man!"

"[Last words] Peter! What are you doing?! NO!"

"I like being bad. It makes me happy."

"Never wound... what you can't kill."

"[Last words] None of that matters, Peter. You're my friend."

"I protected you in high school. Now I'm gonna kick your little ass."

"You knew this was coming, Pete."

"Tell it to my father. Raise him from the dead."

"Everybody needs help sometimes, Peter. Even Spider-Man."

"[after seeing Sandman wiped out in the sewer] Good riddance."

"You want forgiveness? Get religion."

"J. K. Simmons – J. Jonah Jameson"

"Dylan Baker – Dr. Curt Connors"

"Rosemary Harris – May Parker"

"Bryce Dallas Howard – Gwen Stacy"

"Topher Grace – Eddie Brock, Jr. / Venom"

"Thomas Haden Church – Flint Marko / Sandman"

"James Franco – Harry Osborn / New Goblin"

"Sarah Michelle Gellar – Mary Jane "M.J." Watson"

"Tobey Maguire – Peter Parker / Spider-Man"