Tom Hardy appeared on “The Discourse Podcast” from The Playlist and confirmed that a crossover between Venom and Tom Holland‘s Spider-Man “got as close as I could possibly imagine getting” before falling apart. The Oscar nominee would not give a specific reason for why the project never got off the ground, although he did allude that it had to do with studio politics.
“We got close,” Hardy said about a crossover with Holland’s Spider-Man. “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.”
“The Discourse Podcast” host Mike DeAngelo asked if it was studio politics that ultimately killed the crossover, to which Hardy said the project never happened “for all the reasons that you explained ultimately in there.”
“Fundamentally, for me, it would be for the kids,” Hardy added about why he wanted to do a Venom-Spider-Man project. “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. And they don’t know why their favorite characters aren’t in films together.”
Hardy debuted as Venom in Sony’s 2018 movie, which grossed a huge $856 million at the worldwide box office. He reprised the character in two sequels, 2021’s ” Venom: Let There Be Carnage” and 2025’s “Venom: The Last Dance,” the latter of which was billed as Hardy’s last outing as the character and grossed $478 million worldwide.
“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,” Hardy said on the podcast about his comic book movie trilogy. “And in that [regard], we did what we could and what we loved doing. We poured all of ourselves into it within the limits 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.”
Ruben Fleischer, who directed Hardy in the first “Vemom” movie, confirmed to Fandom in 2019 that the plan was always to build Tom Hardy’s comic book franchise into a meeting with Tom Holland’s “Spider-Man.”
“That’s where it’s all going to lead,” Fleischer said at the time. “And that’s the exciting thing, because we changed the origin of Venom [for the first movie]. In the comics, he evolved from Spider-Man, but because of the Marvel-Sony thing, we weren’t able to do that. And so the thing I think it’s building towards, and will be exciting to see, is when they actually do confront each other.”
Hardy told Variety on the red carpet last year at the “Venom: The Last Dance” premiere that “I would love to fight Spider-Man. I would love to fight him now. I’m happy to fight Spider-Man today, 100 percent. I would never say never.”
