In a conversation with the Discourse Podcast from the Playlist, Tom Hardy looked back on his journey as Venom and revealed that the world very nearly got a Sony cross-over between his bumbling violent anti-hero and the heroic web-slinger. The process to bring Tom Holland’s Spider-Man into Venom’s world “got as close as I could possibly imagine getting,” according to Hardy.
In fact, it couldn’t have gotten any closer “apart from doing a film together,” Hardy explained, “which I would have loved to have done because that just means so much fun.”
Ultimately, of course, Hardy’s Venom never did meet Holland’s Spidey. The Discourse Podcast host, Mike DeAngelo, speculated it could have come down to studio politics; without fully conceding, Hardy affirmed carefully to the suggestions, “for all the reasons that you explained ultimately in there.”
What got Hardy excited to make the cross-over happen was simple: “Fundamentally, for me, it would be for the kids,” he said.
“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,” he said, adding that in the end he was just happy to have made his Venom movies. “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.”
As for the modest success in Venom’s global reception, Hardy said it was all he could ask for. “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,” Hardy reflected. “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.”
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