Stan Lee Reveals The Vulture's 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' Origins

Reliving the thrill of arguably the best Spider-Man movie is now within reach as the digital release of “Spider-Man: Homecoming” home edition drops this Tuesday. Aside from the movie itself, new clips and finds are bundled with the release. With that comes an interview (via a Yahoo! Entertainment exclusive ) with Spider-Man creator Stan Lee, where he also reveals the true origins of Alan Toomes/The Vulture (Michael Keaton) and how the character evolved from page to screen.

‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ featurette reveals how The Vulture was created

In the interview (which you can watch below), Lee sheds some light on how The Vulture was born, including how the character was altered to make him more menacing and scary for “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” One of Spider-Man’s first foes, Lee described The Vulture as a villain who doesn’t fit the typical stereotype of a burly, muscular character. “I liked the idea of somebody who is not very muscular but who has the ability to fly,” he says. “The idea of this middle-aged Vulture—there had never, as far as I know, been a villain like that before.”
Michael Chernus, who plays Phineas Mason/The Tinkerer, says that for him, The Vulture was some kind of “scrawny, old dude with weird white hair” and goes on to laugh at how odd the character’s costume is. Well, a green leotard isn’t really that menacing, to begin with. But somehow, it worked in the comics.

As for his on-screen transformation, co-producer Eric Hauserman Carroll shared that the entire costume team had to take a step back and evaluate how The Vulture can be made scarier, thus coming up with a design that we now saw in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” In another interview, co-writer John Goldstein talked about the extreme makeover (including aging him down a bit) that The Vulture had to undergo for him to be able to have a good fit in the movie’s overall theme.
“Once we started talking about Vulture, it was clear that the version in the comics wouldn’t do, where he was this bald old man,” Goldstein said. “It just never felt terribly scary on film to us. So we thought, ‘All right, let’s make him more of a middle-aged guy.”