In the highly-anticipated Venom: Let There Be Carnage trailer released on Monday morning, there’s a brief scene that caught Marvel fans’ attention. While Woody Harrelson‘s Cletus Kennedy (Carnage) narrates a message to Tom Hardy‘s Eddie Brock (Venom), he says a line about waiting for “the rescuer that never comes” that’s punctuated by one of their characters squashing a spider. To Marvel fans, this seems like a pretty deliberate reference to Spider-Man, who (despite being directly tied to Venom in the comics) has remained separate from the Venom movies. That’s tied to a rights issue between Marvel and Sony that led to a nasty, but brief split back in 2019.
But before everyone gets their hopes up that the two studios have already worked out a way to connect Hardy’s Venom to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in the new sequel, director Andy Serkis has some bad news on that front. While breaking down the new trailer for IGN, Serkis said that, for now, the Venom movies are still separate from Spider-Man. Via Comic Book:
“Obviously, there are links between Venom and Spider-Man in the Marvel Universe and the Spider-Man story, but in this, we’re treating this very much as it’s his own world, the Venom story is his own world,” Serkis says. “There are nods and little moments … but on the whole, he’s unaware, they’re unaware, at this point of other characters like Spider-Man. So that’s the way we’ve chosen to play this particular episode of the movie but well we’ll wait and see what little things you can pick out of it.”
While the news will be disappointing for fans hoping to see Hardy and Holland’s characters square off on the big screen, they shouldn’t give up hope just yet. Spider-Man: Far From Home will reportedly introduce the multiverse, which could solve the problem of Venom and Spider-Man existing in separate film worlds pretty easily.
You can watch Serkis break down the new Venom: Let There Be Carnage trailer below (with the Spider-Man talk coming in at the 3:04 mark):
(Via IGN)