Kevin Feige explains why Venom is in Spider-Man: No Way Home

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige explains how long he and his team have been working to finally bring Spider-Man and Venom together on the big screen.

At the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, fans who stuck around for the post-credits stinger were in for a surprise. There was Venom and Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) just watching TV, when reality blipped around them and suddenly they were in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, watching Tom Holland’s Spider-Man get exposed as Peter Parker to an international audience. That means that Venom will show up in Spider-Man: No Way Home, along a host of other Spidey villains past and present.

The relationship between the Venom and Spider-Man moves has always been weird. In Marvel comics, the two are part of the same universe and often face off with one another, as well as lots of other Marvel characters. But when it comes to the screen, it’s a mess. Sony technically owns the screen rights to the Spider-Man family of characters, but the rest of the Marvel catalog is owned by…well, Marvel. So Marvel Studios and Sony struck a deal where they can both use Spider-Man, but Venom is technically still all Sony. So narratively, it took a universe-altering whoopsie to bring them together.

According to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, this collaboration was a while in coming. “You look at the obvious comic connotations between Venom and Spider-Man and it is inherent,” he told Collider. “So the minute Sony made their Venom movie and it worked as well as it did, and Tom Hardy became as iconic as he has become as Venom, then the obvious question is then, ‘How do we start to merge them?”

The first Venom movie became a hit in 2018, so the gears have been turning at least since then. “There was a lot of coordination,” Feige said previously, “between Sony and Marvel and the Venom team and the No Way Home team. We worked together on it.”

We can finally see these two face off on the big screen when No Way Home hits theaters on December 17.

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