While sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage approaches its September 24 release date, star Tom Hardy is already envisioning designs for a prospective third film. Interestingly, for fans still unable to overlook the Spider-Man-less elephant in the franchise room, said designs are auspicious, since they involve a push to finally get the symbiote-joined Eddie Brock and Tom Holland’s Wall-Crawler together to potentially ignite a live-action version of their era-defining comic book rivalry. However, given the twisted web in which Sony’s Marvel movies are stuck, such a face-off would likely require major studio wrangling and multiverse magic.
Hardy is making a passionate push for a yet-to-be-greenlit Venom 3 to center around a battle between his title character and your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man; a notion that seems obvious, seeing as Venom was introduced in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man back in 1988, created by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane as Spidey’s bulky, menacing doppelganger empowered by the shapeshifting alien symbiote costume the hero abandoned. While still mockingly brandishing Spider-Man’s signature symbol on his chest, Venom quickly became an A-list villain and eventual anti-hero, and one of Marvel’s most popular characters, although always a Spider-Man character.
Yet, by contrast, the Venom film franchise has been a curiosity, with the 2018 solo film’s status as a quasi-spinoff of Sony’s Marvel Cinematic Universe-adherent Spider-Man films that bore no apparent connection to the Wall-Crawler, and even set itself away from Spidey’s New York City stomping ground to the other side of the contiguous U.S. in San Francisco. However, in an interview with Esquire, Hardy is unambiguously lobbying for the cinematic connectivity necessary for a Spider-Man showdown.
“I would be remiss if I wasn’t trying to steer any kind of connectivity,” Hardy said when pressed on the Spider-Man question. “I wouldn’t be doing the job if I wasn’t awake and open to any opportunity or eventuality or be excited by that. Obviously, that’s a large canyon to leap, to be bridged by one person alone, and it would take a much higher level of diplomacy and intelligence, sitting down and talking, to take on an arena such as that.”