Ever since the Disney/Sony conflict resolved amicably earlier this year and fostered a new spirit of cooperation between the two studios, fans have been wondering about the connections between Sony’s Spiderverse and the MCU. While Venom was not an MCU movie, it seems that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man will indeed appear in Venom 2 and 3 and J.K. Simmons will be playing J. Jonah Jameson in both Morbius and a future MCU Spidey film.
All this indicates that the two universes might intersect in some way and fans think they’ve now worked out how to get Tom Hardy’s Venom into the MCU. The recent comic Venom #20 reveals some new facts about the alien symbiote, as the story focuses on dimensional rifts between Marvel universes, with a version of the Venom symbiote managing to travel unscathed between the two. This means that anyone bonded with a symbiote should theoretically be able to travel between universes if they have a handy portal.
So, could this be a way for Tom Hardy’s Venom to make his way to the MCU? Perhaps, but I’m not totally sold. For one, this seems really over-complicated, requiring a lot of set-up and introducing a ton of complications to the MCU. Considering that it’s already creaking a little bit after the time travel shenanigans of Avengers: Endgame, I doubt Kevin Feige’s eager to introduce a full-on multiverse to the mix.
What’s far more likely is that they just retroactively say that Venom was in the MCU all along. There are a few rough edges, but simply saying the film was set before The Avengers should fix most of the problems. Sure, the two universes existing in broad parallel might throw up a couple of continuity issues, but consider in the main comics continuity that the X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and Avengers essentially have their own mini-universes, with the occasional crossover event taking place. They’ve even already done this in the MCU itself, with the Netflix shows parceled into their own corner of it with only vague references to the movies. As such, that seems like the smartest route to go down to me.