'Venom' Director Ruben Fleischer Anticipates A Confrontation With Tom Holland As Spider-Man

Venom may have been flogged by critics to the tune of 29% on Rotten Tomatoes, but it landed perfectly fine with audiences, landing a score of 80% from users on the review aggregation site and raking in over $856 million at the worldwide box office. As expected, Sony Pictures is moving forward with a sequel, and if the original film's director Ruben Fleischer is to be believed, they're on their way to a crossover with Venom meeting Spider-Man from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Speaking to Fandom while promoting the upcoming Zombieland: Double Tap, here's what Fleischer said when asked about the possibility of Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock meeting Tom Holland as Peter Parker:

"That's where it's all going to lead. And that's the exciting thing, because we changed the origin of Venom ... in the comics, he evolved from Spider-Man but because of the Marvel-Sony thing we weren't able to 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."

That does sound like a rather enticing prospect. But let's not forget that Ruben Fleischer isn't directing the sequel to Venom. That responsibility is now in the hands of Andy Serkis. That doesn't mean Fleischer can't be trusted to know where the franchise is headed. After all, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige said not to long ago that a crossover between Venom and Spider-Man was likely, though he couldn't be certain since that was a decision Sony Pictures had to make.

After the recent debacle between Sony and Disney about Spider-Man, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that Spider-Man would meet Venom sooner or later if the webslinger was leaving the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now that he's sticking around for another Spider-Man sequel and an appearance in an unnamed future Marvel Studios movie, perhaps the need to make that happen immediately has changed. After all, we're still wondering if Venom will be made part of the MCU or if Peter Parker may end up going to a parallel dimension (Sony's ongoing Spider-Verse) where Venom exists.Venom 2 doesn't have a release date yet, but Spider-Man 3 is slated for July 16, 2021.