Columbia Pictures

Dr. Curt Connors (aka The Lizard) in the New York sewers. He is visited by a mysterious man who could be Norman Osborn in a scene during the end credits.

Spoiler warning: Don't read this if you don't want spoilers for "The Amazing Spider-Man" and possibly its sequel.

Checking out "The Amazing Spider-Man" this week? Don't leave the theater right after the end credits start to roll. If you do, you'll miss a tantalizingly brief scene that hints at questions the movie left unanswered.

In the scene, Dr. Curt Connors (aka The Lizard) sits alone in a cell. Lightning flashes and a cloaked man appears between two slivers of moonlight.

“Did you tell him about his father?” the mysterious man asks Connors.

Connors says that he told young Peter nothing about his father, Richard Parker, and nobly pleads that Peter be left alone. The shrouded man quickly disappears with another strike of lightning.

The scene is brief, but there may be some clues.

First, it’s impossible to know who the second man is. Connors, once a friend of Peter Parker's mysteriously vanished parents, was recently a giant lizard, so it’s hard to trust the soundness of his mental health. Perhaps he imagined the visitor? Maybe it’s a manifestation of the Hyde-like voice inside his head that pushes him to wreak havoc and do evil? Yet, maybe, it’s a real, in-the-flesh person?

When the Huffington Post asked whether the man is Norman Osborn, the head of Oscorp who becomes the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man,” director Marc Webb played coy.

“It’s intentionally mysterious, and I invite speculation,” he told the Huffington Post.

He added, “I like this idea that Oscorp is this Tower of Babel. And every crazy thing in the universe somehow relates to Oscorp.”

Some critics, like Screenrant’s Kofi Outlaw, believe Connors' visitor could imply that The Sinister Six, a group of mad-scientists-turned-monsters, may make their way into “Amazing Spider-Man” sequels.

But, this seems unlikely. “Amazing” turned out strikingly similar to Raimi’s 2002 “Spider-Man," so there’s little reason to think that a sequel will suddenly diverge and add a slew of villains.

Rhys Ifans, the Welsh actor who plays Connors, seems to support the theory that the man is Osborn when he carefully explains the final scene.

“Connors is sent to an asylum … and he’s visited by, shall we say, a representative from Oscorp,” he told MTV.

In March, movie blog CinemaBlend posted an interview with director Marc Webb filmed at WonderCon in California, and in it, Webb suggests that the film ties in to a future sequel. Does this quick scene, then, mean the Green Goblin (played by Willem Dafoe in the 2002 Tobey Maguire version) will be the villain for the second film? Fans will find out when the sequel comes to theaters in 2014.

What do you make of this mysterious scene? Share your thoughts on our Facebook page. 

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