Spider-Man:
Venom began the Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters with a bang as even though it wasn’t a big critical success, the people who went to watch the film completely enjoyed it and as a result of that, the movie became a huge commercial success. The profitability of the film was just insane as the film made $855 Million worldwide off of a production budget of $100 Million. And now what all the fans want is to see Spider-Man go up against Venom.
Ever since the marketing campaign of Venom began, the creatives behind the film and various people from Sony have been talking about a face-off with Spider-Man in the future of the franchise. Sony is setting up their shared Universe by planning to bring in many more Spider-Man related characters, and Jared Leto’s Michael Morbius is going to be the next one that makes his way to the screen.
There is going to be a Venom sequel that follows Morbius and there we will see Venom take on Carnage. But along with these two films, Sony also has a Kraven the Hunter movie under development, and they have bagged Richard Wenk to pen the script of the film.
He spoke to ‘Discussing Film’ about the storyline he is focusing upon as he mentioned the fact that the movie will be based upon Kraven’s Last Hunt, and his efforts would be to make a meaningful path for Spider-Man in the Venomverse.
Here’s what he said:
“It’s an interesting world, a great character… it’s in the Spider-Man universe. I’m going to adhere very closely to the lore of Kraven the Hunter, and he’s going to come face-to-face with Spider-Man. I think that where we’re all circling is that this is Kraven’s Last Hunt, and whether this is the precursor to that movie, whether it will include it, we’re talking about those things. And even the idea that maybe Kraven could be like Kill Bill, basically a two-part movie. It’s all in the mix.”
So the point I am getting at is that Sony does plan to introduce Spider-Man in their own shared Universe, but the problem is that he is at Marvel as of now. Armin from ComicbookCast2 has a source which has confirmed the fact that Sony and Marvel have had a deal and Sony cannot use any version of Spider-Man in Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters. Their contract with Marvel limits Spider-Man to just the MCU and whatever they are planning to do with Spider-Man in their own shared Universe with Venom cannot happen until a specific period of time.
So the bottom line is that Sony cannot have Tom Holland’s Spider-Man show up in a Venom, Morbius or a Kraven movie just because of the fact that they own the character. This could work out only when the contract between Disney and Sony comes to an end. By the time that happens and Sony renegotiates things with Disney, they would probably try to find out a solution for Spidey’s Introduction in the Venomverse.
One thing that they could do is retract Spider-Man from the MCU for good. But only a stupid group of people would do that. The MCU is making Spider-Man huge, and Spider-Man: Far From Home would potentially bring them more than $1 Billion worldwide, so why would they want to do that. This would only mess their working relationship with the biggest company in Hollywood as of now.
So instead, what they could do is that they could make a trade with Disney/Marvel. They could allow Tom Holland’s Spider-Man to continue in the MCU, but besides that, they could demand their own version of live action Spider-Man to be used in the Venomverse, and trade another character that Marvel wants to use in the MCU. So, if Marvel wants to use Kraven, then they could ask for him to be limited to the MCU in exchange for Spider-Man.
This would lead to another actor be cast as Spider-Man and ultimately 2 Spider-Men swinging around in Hollywood. All this could work if handled correctly, and this would be the only way Spider-Man takes on good versions of Venom, Morbius, and other characters that Sony brings in SUMC. But all this is 4-5 years down the line, so let’s see what happens.
