A loud Russian gangster who is given a mechanical rhinoceros to drive in the last scene of a series that then stopped.
Aleksei Sytsevich is a member of the Russian mafia, dim and boastful, whom Spider-Man catches in the opening of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 trying to steal plutonium from Oscorp. Paul Giamatti plays him at full volume. He goes to prison, is freed by Harry Osborn, and comes back at the very end in a rhinoceros-themed mechanical suit with heavy machine guns on the forearms and missile launchers on the shoulders, provided by Gustav Fiers, the Gentleman.
The film’s visual effects supervisor, Jerome Chen, told Entertainment Weekly that the suit was built from modified Soviet-era military gear of the 1980s, which is the kind of detail that explains why it looks like a tank that has been to the gym.
Show detailsThe film that never came
Giamatti confirmed that the Rhino was meant to return in a third Amazing Spider-Man film, before that series was cancelled. His universe is the one this catalogue files as Earth-120703.
Two other Rhinos exist on screen and are not him: a pair of displaced versions held prisoner by the Spider-Society in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, without lines, and a different Aleksei Sytsevich played by Alessandro Nivola in Sony’s Kraven the Hunter, a mercenary who turns into a rhino-human hybrid. That one belongs to Sony’s separate universe, and would need an entry of his own.