Both of these guys have benches so deep that you could lose weeks arguing over just which villains count as the best ones for each. There's a lot to love about both groups, and I think my answer would depend on whether I'd been reading more Batman or Spider-Man stories lately. At the moment I'm favoring Spider-Man's villains, but that's bound to change.
Yeah, I'm wildly upset because this totally matters and there is no way a black guy can possibly convey Johnny Storm's character. Johnny is just so synonymous with the concept of whiteness that casting a black actor will necessitate mass changes to backstory and ruin the movie. If Johnny isn't white, then they might have to like, make him an adoptive brother or cast a black actress for Sue Storm and either one of those things would be so incredibly bad that I would gouge my eyes out if forced to watch a single second of the movie.
Okay, sarcasm got a little out of control there. In all seriousness, there are zero reasons to care about this unless you were really dying to see somebody else in the role. Do I think Hollywood should deliberately try to pull race-changes on established characters? No, that's silly. But there's no sign that this casting would be based on that line of thinking. If a character isn't strongly tied to a certain ethnicity (Black Panther or Doom for example), then the character's ethnicity shouldn't be a big deal in casting. If later down the road we find out that they were definitely looking at this guy because they wanted a black Human Torch, then feel free to be angry. But until then, how about we give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt and assume they're looking at this guy because they think he's a good actor for the role.
Anti-Venom and Flash Thompson as Venom would be my go-to picks. But technically all those characters already existed beforehand, so. . .
Fantomex is a little more than ten years old, but just a few months. If he doesn't count, then. . . maybe Iron Lad? Having a hard time coming up with good characters created within the ten year timeframe, and I suppose Iron Lad has as good a core concept as any.
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