An Animated Venom Movie Could Give The Spider-Verse A Second Life

Venom: The Last Dance served as a swan song for Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and the alien symbiote that occasionally hijacked his body. The 2024 film introduced Knull, the evil god of the symbiotes, to the fray, and Venom sacrificed itself to save the world from Knull’s terror, ending the trilogy on a bittersweet note. Sony’s struggling superhero universe, which included duds like Madame Web and Morbius, seemed to perish with the end of its most successful property, but The Last Dance might not quite be the end for this corner of the Sonyverse. Its live-action world is all but DOA, but it could survive by jumping into Sony’s animated Spider-Verse.

Sony’s live-action anti-hero projects have mostly been grim affairs, and each (aside from Venom) failed to make any cultural or commercial impact. The animated films tell a very different story, though: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse kept Sony’s multiverse alive with a blend of stunning animation and a heartfelt, ambitious adventure. And though the studio is struggling to bring that saga to an end with the long-gestating Beyond the Spider-Verse, animation seems to be the best way to keep this entire franchise alive. It’s why Venom will soon join Miles Morales and Peter Parker by jumping to a new medium.

Venom is officially getting its first solo animated movie courtesy of Sony, with the studio choosing Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, the directors of Final Destination: Bloodlines, to helm the film. Venom’s original creative team — including producers Amy Pascal and Avi Arad, screenwriter and director Kelly Marcel, and star Tom Hardy — are all on board as producers.

While Marcel wrote all three Venom films and directed The Last Dance, she won’t be writing the animated film’s screenplay. Instead, Sony’s animation wing is opening a writers’ room to help develop the script. It’s an interesting approach, but hopefully it will pay off: the Spider-Verse is overflowing with potential, and animation has long seemed like the best way to mine it.

That Sony was so adamant about building its live-action universe without its central heroes, focusing instead on turning cut-and-dry villains into empathetic anti-heroes, was always the saga’s most baffling risk. But bringing Venom into the animated corner of the Spider-Verse could be Sony’s way of remedying years of misguided strategy. The Spider-Verse could finally start to feel like the interconnected world it should have been from the beginning, and if all goes well with Venom, we could see more Spidey villains join the fray.