Sony Pictures has decided to delay Venom: Let There Be Carnage‘s release date. Instead of hitting theaters in September, Venom 2 will instead arrive in early October, due to concerns about the COVID-19 Delta Variant. As news of Let There Be Carnage‘s latest delay sinks in, Marvel movie fans are starting to have a secondary worry: that the Venom sequel being delayed will have a house of cards effect on Sony’s Spider-Man Universe plans – starting with a release date delay for Spider-Man 3. So does the delay of Venom: No Way Home a first sign that Spider-Man: No Way Home won’t be arriving until summer 2022?
Spider-Man: No Way Home – Where’s That Trailer?
Even before we learned that Venom: Let There Be Carnage was going to be delayed a month, there was already major concern about Spider-Man: No Way Home still making its scheduled release date in December. Fans have been worried about the fact that Marvel Studios and Sony have not released any official marketing materials for Spider-Man: No Way Home – no official images, story synopsis, and definitely no trailer.
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With all the rumors and merchandising leaks about No Way Home, the secrecy has been somewhat understandable: the film is supposedly going to bring together Spider-Man characters from all over the multiverse (aka, former Spider-Man movie franchise stars like Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield). For most of the summer, fans have held on to the belief that Marvel and Sony were holding back on revealing Spider-Man: No Way Home in order to let series like Loki and/or Marvel’s What If…? set the foundation and rules of a Marvel Multiverse. But as the COVID-19 Delta Variant surges all across the world, and consumer confidence in movie theaters drops, Marvel fans are turning toward a different idea about why No Way Home hasn’t shown anything yet.
Spider-Man: No Good Release Date
The pessimistic view is that Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures can’t market Spider-Man: No Way Home because the studios aren’t yet confident that the December 2021 release date will hold. If studios have definitely learned one thing from the pandemic, it’s that if you put out marketing materials for a film and then have to change release dates, you’ll end up paying double for the new wave of updated marketing materials that are needed. Spider-Man: No Way Home is a potential billion-dollar movie, with some (supposedly) big secrets to protect: you only get one shot at marketing a film like that.
Does Venom 2’s Delay Affect Spider-Man: No Way Home?
Now, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is sitting in close proximity to Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s release date – closer than Sony and Marvel may want it to be. If Spider-Man: No Way Home has to move dates, there’s is almost zero chance that it would be moved just a month or so, like Venom 2. Again, No Way Home is a potential billion-dollar movie, with what is potentially one of the biggest blockbuster spectacles in the history of comic book movies. If the Christmas holiday window is no longer viable, there’s only one other place to release a film as big as Spider-Man: No Way Home: summer of 2022.
Right now, this is all just speculation – but the situation also seems to be evolving at a rapid pace.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage will be released in theaters on October 15th. Spider-Man: No Way Home is set for release on December 17th (for now).