Has Venom: The Last Dance’s trailer drawn Spider-Man: No

Some viewers are unhappy that Marvel and Sony’s universes seem to be leaking into each other. But a strong franchise should be able to go everywhere all at once

What a pity Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock didn’t last very long in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One meagre end-credits scene at the tail end of Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Brock and his disgusting symbiotic buddy were wrenched back to Sony’s slightly pitiful Spider-Man Universe. In the grand scheme of things, this is a bit like joining the orchestra performing a symphony at Carnegie Hall only to discover yourself suddenly strumming a broken guitar in the bogs at HMP Pentonville.

Even more strangely, there are weird echoes of Brock’s brief appearance in the MCU in the debut trailer for Hardy’s final appearance as the alien-assisted antihero in Venom: The Last Dance, which hit the interweb this week. Remember how we last saw Eddie getting drunk in a bar, while the multiversal events of No Way Home all happened somewhere a long, long way away? And then, just as he was dragged back to his own reality by some primal unknown force, we noticed that a small piece of the alien symbiote was left behind.