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Feb 08, 2018 By Christopher Roberts Tom Hardy

Venom is a standalone movie about Spider-Man villain (and later anti-hero) Venom. It stars Tom Hardy as the title character and his alter-ego Eddie Brock and it’s due out October 5, 2018 via Sony. Now the first teaser trailer for the movie has been shared. Here’s the rub, it doesn’t actually feature Venom. You see Hardy as Brock, but you never see him in costume as Venom. But, hey, it’s just a teaser.

Sony has the film rights to Spider-Man and while they’ve done a deal to incorporate everyone’s favorite wall crawler into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, last year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, and future movies, they still seem intent on making movies on other characters in the Spider-Man universe. There’s some confusion over whether or not Venom is set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and whether or not Spider-Man (currently played by Tom Holland) will appear. How they do a movie on Venom, a character whose origin is so intertwined with Spider-Man, is hard to imagine.

Ruben Fleischer (who did Zombieland, yay!, but also did Gangster Squad, boo!) is directing a script by Scott Rosenberg (Pain & Gain, Jumanji) and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2). Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach are producing along with Amy Pascal.

Venom/Eddie Brock first showed up in the Spider-Man comics in the 1980s. The basic idea is that Spider-Man (aka Peter Parker) got a strange new living black alien costume on another planet during the Secret Wars miniseries. The costume started to affect Spider-Man, almost turning him bad, and eventually merged with Eddie Brock, a corrupt rival photographer to Peter Parker, thus forming the villain Venom. Venom/Eddie Brock was previously played by Topher Grace in 2007’s Spider-Man 3, which didn’t go over too well. Hopefully this version will turn out better, but it’s still confounding how it works without having Spider-Man at least in the first quarter of the movie.

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