The Venom franchise was hugely successful for Sony Pictures, but each movie still made less than the one before it. Then, when Tom Hardy confirmed he would be stepping away as Eddie Brock after the trilogy concluded, the studio found itself without a leading man.
While Hardy was likely just using the end of his contract as a way of publicly negotiating with Sony for a bigger payday, we heard the plan was to pivot and shift the spotlight to a new host: Flash Thompson.
A soldier named "Thompson" lost his legs courtesy of a Xenophage in Venom: The Last Dance, so it seems the idea was for the surviving piece of the Symbiote to bond with him before reuniting with Eddie to battle Knull, the apparent big bad of Sony's Spider-Man-less Universe.
All plans have been put on hold since Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter bombed. Sony is now focusing on getting Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse across the finish line and gearing up to shoot Spider-Man: Brand New Day (a co-production with Marvel Studios).
Planned Spider-Verse spin-offs haven't come to fruition yet—at least one was said to revolve around the franchise's female characters±—but @MyTimeToShineH is now claiming that an animated Venom movie is in the works.
Would it be tied to the live-action franchise or something completely different? The latter seems more likely, and lots can still be done with the Lethal Protector, particularly in an animated project which perhaps takes us into the Venomverse. That would be a good place to explore Knull as a Multiversal threat, too.
We'll see what happens, but if done right, more Venom on our screens is never a bad thing.
"We got close. We got as close as I could possibly imagine getting, apart from doing a film together, which I would have loved to have done because that just means so much fun," Hardy said of his Venom never getting to share the screen with Spider-Man.
"Fundamentally, for me, it would be for the kids. Because, you know, as much as adults love superhero films, as you can tell by the box office when they’re successful, I think I’m constantly reminded by children how important these characters are," he continued. "And they don’t know why their favorite characters aren’t in films together."
"We were given a set of boundaries, and we were just really privileged to be able to play with a much-beloved IP like Venom in a way that we were allowed to play. And in that [regard], we did what we could and what we loved doing."
"We poured all of ourselves into it within the remits of what we were allowed to do with him. And so the enjoyment of the work outweighed the limits of our possibilities with him because we just focused on what we were allowed to do. And we loved doing it," Hardy concluded.
What would you like to see from an animated Venom movie?