Tom Hardy's Venom Will Never Meet Tom Holland's Spider-Man

Tom Hardy has a project to promote — in this case, his new series MobLand on Paramount+ — so that inevitably means Marvel questions for quick and easy headlines. (Hi, how you doing?) Hardy recently wrapped up his “Marvel” run with Venom: The Last Dance, which closed the chapter on a film trilogy centered on one of Spider-Man’s most famous villains, yet had absolutely no connection to Spider-Man.

While there was a brief flirtation in the end credit scenes for Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Spider-Man: No Way Home, nothing ever came to fruition and not without lack of trying on Hardy’s part. In a nutshell, Sony Pictures owns the movie rights to Spider-Man hence the non-stop parade of wet farts masquerading as films like Morbius, Kraven, and Madame Web. It’s the one piece of the Marvel puzzle that continues to elude Disney’s grasp, and the historic sharing of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has been a particularly dicey situation that already blew up once back in 2019. It’s remained a fraught situation that ultimately kept Hardy’s Venom from ever meeting Holland’s wall-crawler.

Via The Playlist:

Hardy admitted there were conversations, and they came close but suggested that the aforementioned studio politics were the culprit.

“We got close,” he said about a crossover. “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.”

“And for all the reasons that you explained ultimately in there,” he continued, alluding to the politick question.

Hardy also revealed that kids, including his own, have been particularly bummed that his Venom never got to share the screen with Holland. For Chrissakes, the character is literally an evil monster version of Spider-Man created for the express purpose of locking the two in visually dynamic battles while exploring Peter Parker’s internal conflict with his powers. As Hardy notes, kids don’t understand rights issues, and at the end of the day, these movies are for them. Still, he had a blast despite his Venom being walled off.

“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,” Hardy told The Playlist. “And in that [regard], we did what we could and what we loved doing.”

I wish I had something quippy to say here, but the important thing is that Kraven thankfully stabbed a knife in the whole endeavor of making movies about Spider-Man villains without actually having Spider-Man in them. It’s like making a movie about a baseball bat, but never once showing a ball because the rights are tangled in a complex revenue-sharing agreement. That’s the excitement of the movies, folks!