The debate has raged for a week now, and the question on every Spider-nerd’s mind is “Which villain will Thomas Hayden Church be playing?” Aint-It-Cool-News is once again claiming to have the inside track, despite the fact that they’ve already been flat out wrong about much of X3’s character casting. Generally, AICN is usually only half right, so who knows what any of this means. But they’ve got this to say about who Hayden Church will be playing in Spider-Man 3:

“Multiple spies at Sony have confirmed that Thomas Hayden Church will indeed be playing SANDMAN. There's a ton of Sandman conceptual art all over the Spidey-offices!”

To me, this almost sounds more like wishful thinking than anything. The uber-comic nerd, most represented by AICN’s proprieter Harry Knowles is absolutely in love with the Sandman character, and started declaring him the next villain before the ink on Thomas Hayden Church’s contract was even dry. But, in the absence of any other information, they could be right.

Sandman, is exactly what he sounds like: a villain made out of sand. Easily defeated by beach towels, he has in addition to other talents, sand-based shape shifting abilities, having been transformed into dirt by a stock dose of radiation.