On paper, Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man-less Spidey-verse, comprised of supporting characters like Venom, Morbius and Silver & Black sounds like it shouldn’t work. After all, it’s a bit like being served a burger without the patty inside. But to their credit, they’re making it work. I mean, from the reactions to that Comic-Con footage, they’ve really nailed the gory body horror of Venom, and what we’re hearing about the Jared Leto-starring Morbius project sounds pretty promising.
But now we’re learning that we might be seeing Spider-Man in this universe, after all. Venom director Ruben Fleischer was asked directly about it by CinemaBlend at San Diego Comic-Con and said the following:
Any true fan of Venom would love to see him go against Spider-Man. So I have to think that’s gonna happen at some point.
So, there you have it – what sounds like confirmation that we’ll see the Tom Hardy’s Venom going up against his arch-enemy Spider-Man. Now, the real question is which Spider-Man will it be? I don’t know the legal intricacies of the agreement Sony have with Disney on the use of the character, but I’d assume there’s a rule that they aren’t allowed to introduce any new live-action takes on the hero while Tom Holland’s appearing in MCU movies. So how is this going to work?
Well, my theory’s that Sony’s Spidey-verse isn’t going to be explicitly in the MCU, but there’ll be no reason why it can’t be retroactively included at a later date. After all, Marvel Studios have many MCU projects at the moment that manage to both be officially ‘in-universe’ while rarely directly acknowledging the events of the major movies.
For example, Runaways is an MCU series, yet has no real connections to anything else going on in the universe. I’d imagine Sony are playing it safe for now by keeping their world as generic as possible so as not to contradict the MCU and allow for the possibility of Tom Holland’s Spidey swinging in to connect their Spidey-verse with the Marvel Cinematic Universe at a later date.
While it’d be an awesome surprise if Holland were to cameo in Venom, I think it’s looking unlikely at this point, so any MCU cross-pollination will probably have to take place in a future sequel – which is obviously a ways off yet.
