Venom Director Reveals How He Crafted a Spider-Man-Free Origin
Seven years after Tom Hardy’s Venom, director Ruben Fleischer breaks down how he built a Spider-Man-free origin from the ground up — and the creative hurdles that came with starting from scratch.
Venom turning into a hit without Spider-Man was always a little wild. Now, seven years after Tom Hardy first slimed up in 2018, director Ruben Fleischer is talking about how they actually pulled that off: by reinventing the character from the ground up because, legally, they had to.
The Spider-Man problem
On The Playlist's Discourse Podcast, Fleischer said the mandate back then was simple and tricky: make a Venom movie that cannot use Spider-Man. That meant Eddie Brock, the symbiote's origin, and even the look had to be reconceived without leaning on the comics' connection to Peter Parker.
'Venom was always defined by Spider-Man - our movie couldn't feature Spider-Man. So it created an interesting challenge.'
Fleischer also explained that while there was always a hypothetical where Venom and Spider-Man might cross paths down the road, they couldn't build the first movie around a maybe. The film had to stand on its own.
Designing a symbiote with no spider
This is where the nerdy, surprisingly thorny stuff comes in. In the comics, Venom has a big white spider on his chest because the symbiote once bonded with Spider-Man. In 2018, that history didn't exist on screen. So Fleischer's team made a new chest pattern and essentially an original origin story to justify it. No spider emblem, no winks at Peter, no shortcuts.
About those post-credits teases
Hardy and Tom Holland did technically brush up against each other in tags: the Venom: Let There Be Carnage post-credit scene pulled Eddie into the MCU to glimpse Holland's Spidey on TV, and Spider-Man: No Way Home's tag sent Eddie back home. Those moments teased a future meet-up, but it never materialized into an actual crossover.
- Fleischer says the writers had to rethink Eddie Brock without Spider-Man from day one.
- They built Venom's origin and visual design from scratch, including a new chest motif without the spider.
- The first film was always meant to be distinct, with any crossover possibilities kept strictly hypothetical.
- Post-credit tags in Let There Be Carnage and No Way Home dangled the idea of a team-up, but it didn't happen.
Bottom line: the Venom you saw in 2018 wasn't a workaround so much as a full-on reimagining to make the character function without his most famous frenemy. And whether you loved or hated that approach, it was intentional from frame one.