Venom vs. Spider-Man Movie: Tom Hardy Says Sony & Marvel "Got Close" to Crossover

Spider-Man archvillain Venom made it into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the mid-credits scenes ending 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Spider-Man: No Way Home, but that’s as close as Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) ever got to Peter Parker (Tom Holland). The Sony-produced Venom sequel set up a quasi-crossover between Sony’s Spider-Man Universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe when Eddie and his symbiote other half were magically transported from one cinematic universe to the other, where the alien, through a multiversal hivemind, recognized an unmasked Spider-Man.

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Eddie did appear, albeit briefly, in Sony and Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: No Way Home, which revealed he was at a bar in Mexico trying to understand the MCU (Iron Man? Hulk? A purple alien that loves stones?) during the events of the film, where a spell cast by the sorcerer Doctor Strange pulled multiversal Spider-Man villains from across the Spider-Verse into one reality. And just as soon as he appeared, Eddie disappeared when he was returned to his home universe (as seen in Venom: The Last Dance), leaving a small piece of the Venom symbiote behind.

As it turns out, there were plans for more of a crossover between Sony’s SSU and Disney’s MCU with Hardy’s Venom and Holland’s Spider-Man.

“We got close,” Hardy told The Discourse Podcast. “We got as close as I could possibly imagine getting, apart from doing a film together, which I would have loved to have done because that just means so much fun.”

When host Mike DeAngelo asked if “studio politics” caused the Venom/Spider-Man movie not to happen, Hardy answered it was “for all the reasons that you explained ultimately in there.”

Hardy went on to say that his children were disappointed that Venom never crossed paths with Spider-Man over the course of his trilogy, which ended in October with the apparent death of the Venom symbiote and Knull (Andy Serkis), the King in Black and progenitor of the symbiotes, mounting an attack on Earth in a post-credits scene.

“Fundamentally, for me, it would be for the kids,” Hardy said of the potential Venom 4 or Spider-Man 4 crossover. “Because, you know, as much as adults love superhero films, as you can tell by the box office when they’re successful, I think I’m constantly reminded by children how important these characters are, and they don’t know why their favorite characters aren’t in films together.”

“We were given a set of boundaries, and we were just really privileged to be able to play with a much-beloved IP like Venom in a way that we were allowed to play,” he added. “And in that [regard], we did what we could and what we loved doing. We poured all of ourselves into it within the limits of what we were allowed to do with him. And so the enjoyment of the work outweighed the limits of our possibilities with him because we just focused on what we were allowed to do. And we loved doing it.”

Sony initially developed the first Venom to be part of the same continuity as the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies, which would have spawned two more sequels — 2016’s Amazing Spider-Man 3 and 2018’s Amazing Spider-Man 4 — and two spinoffs, Sinister Six and Venom. (In a 2014 interview, producer Matt Tolmach said there would be “a lot of crossover in those movies.”)

Those plans fell through when Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed at the box office, and Sony agreed to bring a rebooted Spider-Man, now played by Tom Holland, into the MCU in a five-picture pact announced in 2015.

Under that deal, it was agreed that Sony would license out Spider-Man for appearances in Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War (2016), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige would produce, along with Amy Pascal, 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming and 2019’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. It was also announced at the time that Sony Pictures would continue to finance, distribute, own, and have final creative control of the Spider-Man movies.

The two studios famously had a falling out once that deal expired with the release of Far From Home in 2019, but later that year, Sony and Marvel announced a new deal for one more Spider-Man movie (Spider-Man: No Way Home) and an appearance in a future MCU movie (believed to be 2027’s Avengers: Secret Wars).

There was also Sony’s attempt to further intertwine the MCU with its own SSU in 2022’s Morbius. The Sony-produced Spider-Man spinoff ended with Spider-Man: Homecoming villain the Vulture (Michael Keaton) being pulled out of the MCU and into the SSU, where he met the living vampire Michael Morbius (Jared Leto).

With Hardy declaring Venom: The Last Dance his final outing as Venom — and last year’s Kraven the Hunter bombing at the box office, leaving Sony’s SSU in limbo — it seems the wall-crawler won’t meet the Lethal Protector.