Any film fans feverishly awaiting news of a Venom and Spider-Man crossover movie can consider their sweaty brows mopped by comments from the main symbiote himself, Tom Hardy, in his current exclusive interview and cover shoot for Esquire. It seems the star of the imminent Venom: Let There Be Carnage is keen on the idea too – more than keen, in fact – as he told us during an interview in Cardiff in late July, although he expressed his interest in the idea in his own inimitable way.
“I would be remiss if I wasn’t trying to steer any kind of connectivity,” he told Esquire, of the question of whether he would like Venom and Spider-Man to rub shoulders on celluloid some time soon. “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.
“Should both sides be willing,” he continued, “and it be beneficial to both sides, I don’t see why it couldn’t be. I hope and strongly, with both hands, push, eagerly, towards that potential, and would do anything to make that happen, within what’s right in business. But it would be foolish not to head towards the Olympic Games if you were running 100 metres, so yeah! I want to play on that field.”
The “large canyon to leap” to which he refers is of course the current byzantine deal by which the Spider-Man films are made by Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, while Venom and several other characters with stand-alone films in development – Morbius due next year, and Kraven the Hunter in 2023 – now belong to the separate Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters (despite the fact that Venom is one of Spider-Man’s most notorious adversaries).
President of Sony Pictures Sanford Panitch has already hinted that a Venom-Spidey meet-up is in the works, and that more will be revealed in Spider-Man: No Way Home when it is released in December. But if Hardy’s up for it – and we think, from what he told us, he is – the deal-makers can consider themselves halfway there. Or, given that Hardy plays both Eddie Brock and Venom, two-thirds.
