Green Goblin

Green Goblin / Norman Osborn
Dr. Norman Osborn is a brilliant scientist and businessman/industrialist who is known for his contributions to nanotechnology. As in the comics, he has a distant relationship with his son, Harry, who resents his father's apparent favoritism toward his friend Peter Parker. Norman takes an immediate liking to Peter when he is informed that Parker can understand his work, and later admires Parker's desire to make his own way in the world, rather than accepting Osborn's help. He is the head of OsCorp, a company contracted by the United States military to create a new supersoldier. Osborn's colleague, Dr. Mendel Stromm, feels it important to reveal to the military official overseeing the project that some of the test subjects have gone insane. Hearing this, Osborn is threatened with a tight deadline. Needing to prove his formula can succeed, Osborn experiments on himself and becomes the Green Goblin. The process drives him insane however, and he kills Stromm. The military decides to give the supersoldier contract to another company, Quest Aerospace, and in revenge, the Green Goblin kills several high-ranking military officers and Quest scientists who were present at the test. Although Quest Aerospace's prototype was destroyed, the company decides to expand and, in doing so, assumes control of OsCorp on the condition that Norman Osborn step down as CEO.

In retaliation, the Goblin kills the board of directors during a festival in Times Square, thus removing the last threat to his takeover of OsCorp, and inadvertently almost killing Mary Jane Watson. His appearance at the festival also marks the beginning of his animosity towards Spider-Man. Instead of hating his new enemy, however, Norman views Spider-Man as the son that he always wanted, and attempts to recruit him to his side.

The Goblin next leads an attack at the Daily Bugle to question J. Jonah Jameson for the identity of the photographer who takes pictures of Spider-Man. Peter is at the office during the attack and soon shows up as Spider-Man. The Goblin gasses him and takes him to a rooftop, where he offers Spider-Man a partnership and belittles his choice to become a hero, warning that eventually the city will turn against him. This starts to become true when the Bugle in response to the attack prints a story claiming the Goblin and Spider-Man are allies.

A few days later the Goblin baits Spider-Man into a burning building and asks him if he's decided to join him. When Spider-Man refuses, the Goblin attempts to kill him with razor bats and eventually slips away. Norman finds out Spider-Man's identity when, while visiting his son Harry (who is Peter's roommate) for Thanksgiving, he discovers that Peter has an identical wound to one he had inflicted on Spider-Man in the earlier fight. After deducing Spider-Man's identity, he decides to leave though Harry tries to stop him. Norman tells Harry to do what he wants with Mary Jane and then dump her fast, as he believes she is only interested in his money, as his own wife was. After hallucinating that his other persona informs him to attack Spider-Man's heart, he attacks and seriously injures Aunt May, then kidnaps Mary Jane and tells Spider-Man that he must choose either to save her or to save a group of children in a cable car. Both are thrown off the Queensboro Bridge, yet Spider-Man saves both the children and Mary Jane.

After saving the children and Mary Jane, Spider-Man is lured into an abandoned building. Goblin then throws a pumpkin bomb and it explodes in Spider-Man's face, sending him through a brick wall. As the Goblin brutally beats Spider-Man, he tells him how he will kill Mary Jane slowly. Enraged, Spider-Man attacks him, and gains the upper hand. After being defeated in their final battle and with his own personality apparently resurfaced, Norman removes his Goblin helmet to reveal himself to Spider-Man, and begs the hero to forgive him and protect him from the Goblin persona. At the same time however, Norman (with the Goblin still controlling him) secretly directs his glider to impale Spider-Man from behind. Norman states he was like a father to him and begs him to be a son to him, to which Peter retorts that he had a father: his late uncle, Benjamin Parker. The Goblin responds by launching his glider.

Spider-Man senses the attack with his spider-sense and dodges, and the machine kills the Green Goblin by impaling him. Just before dying, Norman begs Spider-Man not to tell his son about his second identity. When Spider-Man takes Norman's corpse back to his mansion, Harry sees him placing his father’s dead body on a bed. Not knowing that his father was the Green Goblin, Harry holds Spider Man responsible for his death. At the funeral, Harry swears revenge on Spider-Man.

In the film, the Green Goblin pilots a high-tech Goblin Glider, armed with seeking missiles and machine guns. He also wears green armor that cybernetically connects him to his glider and weapons. He is seen using three varieties of his signature "pumpkin bombs": one which is a simple explosive; one that releases a bright, radioactive flash which reduces people to skeletons; and one that splits into flying, razor-bat blades. Rather than carrying a shoulder "bag of tricks", the weapons are contained in the glider and are ejected individually out of their storage compartment when desired. His suit is armed with knockout gas that is released from the wrists. His suit is also linked to the Goblin Glider, allowing him to control it remotely.

At the climax of the movie, when Norman was impaled by his glider, he died very much the same way his original comic counterpart did. However, in the comics, it turned ut that Norman had a healing ability that allows him to survive lethal wounds. When Norman of the comics woke up in the morgue, he killed a mortician who looked just like him, replaced his body with that of the dead mortician's so that it would be that corpse buried at the funeral while Norman would return twenty years later to seek revenge on Spider-Man. If this is so, then Norman might not have been dead in the movies and may have returned for any future sequels. But since the announcement of the Spider-Man movie reboot cancels out any sequels, it can be safely assumed that Norman really is dead.