It is looking more and more like the third Tom Holland Spider-Man film is going to dive deep into the Spiderverse lore as it has been announced that Alfred Molina, who played Doc Ock in the second Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movie, is set to reprise his role.

Variety reports that the 67-year-old actor is going to play Doctor Otto Octavius in the third Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland. Molina had first played a role in Spider-Man 2, where Tobey Maguire played the wall-crawler.

Molina is also the second villain from a previous Spider-Man film to join the Tom Holland iteration of the franchise. Earlier this year, Jamie Foxx was announced as part of the cast. Foxx played the supervillain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which starred Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man.

The Hollywood Reporter says that this news confirmed earlier rumors that Molina had been spotted on the still-untitled Spider-Man film set. Aside from Foxx and Holland, Molina will also be joining cast members Marisa Tomei, Zendaya, Tony Revolori, and Jacob Batalon, just to name a few.

This third Spider-Man film is a follow-up to the wildly successful 2019 film, Spider-Man: Far From Home. It is the highest-grossing Spider-Man film of all time, bringing in $1 billion in ticket sales.

However, it is not just the different Spider-Man films that this film is bringing together, but it is also connecting those films to the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is evidenced by Benedict Cumberbatch joining the cast as Doctor Strange.

With Tony Stark dead at the end of Avengers: Endgame, Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange is expected to be the one mentoring Tom Holland’s Peter Parker in the movie. His presence in the film, alongside Molina and Foxx, also means that those characters now exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The fact that Cumberbatch will then go on to shoot Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness after this Spider-Man film has fans fully expecting that the Spiderverse theory is going to be proven correct.

The third Spider-Man film is expected in theaters on Dec. 17, 2021, but that may still change depending on the global coronavirus pandemic state. In the United States, the Dec. 8 update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases at 14,823,129 people. Deaths caused by COVID-19 are now at 282,785 people.

Globally, the World Health Organization’s Dec. 8 update says there is now 67,210,778 confirmed COVID-19. Fatalities from COVID-19 are now at 1,540,777 people.