The Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown into a behemoth since its inception in 2008, with dozens of projects, hundreds of characters, and thousands of hours of screen time, making it near-impossible to keep up with the franchise in its entirety. While Marvel Studios is pretty good about keeping up with the heroes of the mainline MCU, the projects on the periphery of the franchise often have characters who are completely forgotten about, such as this fan-favorite villain.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (aka the SSU) was one of the weirdest chapters of the MCU. The project seemed like a one-sided relationship, with Sony desperately shoving MCU connections into every project while Marvel Studios ignored these attempts. SSU characters like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter are mostly forgotten at this point, but there was one breakout star of the franchise: Venom.
2018’s Venom kicked off the SSU, and while the rest of the cinematic universe was an abject failure, the Venom series was the one diamond in the rough. Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock was a genuinely fun character to watch, and his solo movies were each more commercially and critically successful than other SSU projects. While the Venom films weren’t awards-season darlings, they were regarded as fun, which is probably why it’s the only series that kept coming back. The series got its first sequel with the release of 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and then the trilogy concluded with the release of 2024’s Venom: The Last Dance, in which Venom dies, Eddie Brock retires from superheroics, and Knull teases an even grander plan.
The third film hit theaters on October 25, 2024, and since the SSU was seemingly falling apart in the lead-up to the film, it was framed as the final goodbye to the character. While it wasn’t the grand finale of the SSU, with that honor instead going to 2024’s Kraven the Hunter, The Last Dance was definitely the grand finale of the franchise’s cultural impact. The movie earned 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, and while this isn’t great, it’s pretty good for the SSU. Plus, it made $478.9 million on a budget of $120 million. The film spawned memes and reignited the cultural conversation surrounding the SSU, and while it wasn’t tearful, it was a goodbye.
Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and his symbiotic superhero companion were easily the highlight of the SSU. Hardy’s performance was a lot of fun, and the character was genuinely compelling, even if the films he was surrounded by were a comparative letdown. So, it is surprising that we haven’t seen Hardy’s Venom come back yet. After all, audiences would probably be excited to see the character in the MCU, with the caveat that he appears in better movies than the solo villain films that Sony was churning out. Now that we’ve seen this iteration of the character as a superhero for three movies, it would be fun to see Venom’s transformation into a villain as he faces off with Tom Holland’s Spider-Man.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we’ll ever see Tom Hardy’s Venom make a return. The SSU that he emerged from seems to be over. Most of the in-development villain projects were cancelled, and the team-up movie that projects like Morbius teased never came to fruition. Instead, Sony seems to be focused on making spinoffs of the Spider-Verse movies, such as the Prime Video Spider-Noir series. Thus, there isn’t really a place for Sony to utilize the character in the future, excluding the outlandish possibility that the villain films start back up.
So, if Marvel wanted to keep using this Venom outside of the SSU, the most obvious way to do it would be to transfer him to the MCU. However, this already happened, and the MCU did almost nothing with it. The post-credits scene of Let There Be Carnage saw Venom get transported to the MCU, setting up a crossover in Spider-Man: No Way Home. However, Venom only appeared in the film’s mid-credits scene, where he is transported back to his home universe without much consequence. A bit of the symbiote is left in the MCU, but another Spider-Man film has come and gone since this reveal without anything happening. So, it is doubtful that this symbiote will ever amount to anything.
So, bar the MCU going in a wildly different direction, there is only one more place where Hardy’s Venom has a good chance of coming back. Avengers: Secret Wars is set to be the grand conclusion to the MCU’s Multiverse Saga, and if what we know about Avengers: Doomsday is anything to go off of, Secret Wars will be filled with characters who originated outside of Earth-199999. The MCU probably doesn’t want to further associate itself with the SSU, but if any character from this odd franchise were to appear, it would be Venom. It’s still a long shot, but it isn’t unreasonable for fans of the character to have their fingers crossed.
