Does Spider-Man: No Way Home set up the black costume and a new Venom?

Until now – because the multiverse madness being exploited to great effect in recent Marvel movies and TV shows has allowed for the lines between the MCU and the Sony-verse to get just a little fuzzy, even if we still may not be heading for the Tom (Holland) vs. Tom (Hardy) brawl of fans' dreams.

The first confirmation that the two foes might finally go toe-to-toe came with the post-credits scene of Venom sequel Let There Be Carnage (released in September this year), in which Hardy's Eddie Brock appeared to be transported from one universe to another and was confronted with news footage of Spider-Man's secret identity being exposed (as we'd previously seen play out at the climax of 2019's Spider-Man: Far From Home).

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This sequence appeared to be setting up the crossover we'd all been hoping for – but while Hardy does appear as Brock in Spider-Man: No Way Home, again via a post-credits scene, he's relegated to a brief cameo, sharing no screen-time with Holland's Peter Parker, and what's more is transported back to his own universe (courtesy of Dr. Strange reversing the spell he'd botched earlier in the film) before the scene is over.

So was the whole thing just a big tease? Have our hopes of seeing MCU Spidey go up against Venom been quashed? Well, perhaps not...

Though Hardy's version of Venom is transported back to his own world, he leaves behind part of the symbiote – which suggests we might be about to see a classic Spider-Man comic storyline play out on-screen, concerning an origin story for a whole new version of Venom.

In the original comic books, it was Peter Parker, not Eddie Brock, who was the first human to come into contact with the Venom symbiote, bringing it back to Earth from an alien world. Parker wore the living alien costume for an extended period, before discovering its true sinister nature and separating himself from it. When the symbiote found itself a new host in Brock, it had absorbed Spider-Man's powers, granting Brock similar abilities to ol' web-head.

Spidey's involvement in Venom's origin story was obviously excised in 2018's Venom – but now that the symbiote (or at least part of it) exists in the MCU, could we see a version of this plotline play out after all? Certainly, Holland's Peter coming into contact with the alien costume and it driving him to antisocial, increasingly violent behaviour would be an interesting path to take after No Way Home saw the character struggle with his hunger for vengeance and ended with him totally isolated from his support system – his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) dead, his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), best pal Ned (Jacob Batalon) and ally Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) having forgotten he ever existed.

But what of Venom? Presumably, there are no plans for Hardy's version of Eddie Brock to play a major role in the MCU or he too would have escaped Strange's spell and stayed put. But No Way Home's post-credits scene does open up the possibility that the MCU could introduce its own version of the villain to go up against Spider-Man after our hero sheds the black costume and unwittingly passes it on to a new host.

Again, referring back to the source material, there have been a number of different Venom hosts over the years besides Brock, a number of which have already featured in the MCU – the most notable being Peter's former high school classmate Flash Thompson and the villain (and one-time Scorpion) Mac Gargan, and while it's difficult to imagine Tony Revolori's screen version of Flash (mostly utilised for comic relief and a far cry from the jock bully he's portrayed as in the comics) turning bad, Michael Mando's take on criminal Gargan (as last seen in 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming) could be a contender to step up as the MCU's Venom.

The other option, what with this being a multiverse and all, is that we could meet a different version of disgruntled journalist Eddie Brock, played by an actor other than Tom Hardy. That might seem like a stretch, but given that Spider-Man: No Way Home featured no less than three different versions of Peter Parker/Spider-Man, perhaps it's not as wild a concept as it might have once seemed.

If 13 years of MCU movies has taught us anything, it's that Marvel always has a plan, so it's safe to assume that the symbiote remaining in the Tom Holland Spidey-verse was no mere afterthought. Something is definitely afoot here, even if it's not quite the Spider-Man/Venom confrontation we were expecting.

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Spider-Man: No Way Home is out now in UK cinemas. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.

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