Can monstrously long tongues fracture the multiverse? In the frenzy-stirring post-credits scene for Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Sony’s series of Spider-Man spinoffs seems to have suddenly merged with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Until now, it didn’t seem that Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock would ever meet heroes like the Avengers or Spider-Man. But what the Let There Be Carnage post-credits scene presupposes is … maybe now he will?
Okay, what just happened?
After thwarting Carnage, the post-credits scene finds Eddie and Venom relaxing in a hotel room on a well-deserved tropical vacation, watching a soap opera together. Then Venom drops a truth bomb: Because he’s a symbiote, he’s got “light-years of knowledge” that he keeps hidden from Eddie despite their psychic bond. The reason? Basically, Venom doesn’t want Eddie’s mind to be blown so hard that he’d go insane. Still, Venom offers to show Eddie a glimpse of what he means and then things go nuts.
Suddenly, everything about the room changes, implying we’re now in another universe’s version of the same place. Now it’s not a soap opera on TV. Instead, Eddie is watching what looks like the post-credits scene from Spider-Man: Far From Home, in which J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) reveals to the world that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is Spider-Man. Has Venom broken the multiverse? No! Venom claims he “didn’t do this.” His tongue does lick the screen and the image of Spider-Man’s face. Gross, but not incriminating. The question now is: Will Venom lick Spider-Man’s face for real? Has Let There Be Carnage set up an actual crossover?
Is Tom Hardy’s Venom in the MCU now?
The short answer: It looks that way, but we don’t really know for sure. Legally speaking, in our real-life universe, the character of Spider-Man is on extended loan to Marvel Studios from Sony, and Peter Parker only appears in the continuity of the post–Civil War MCU movies thanks to a “content-licensing agreement.” Back in 2018, when the first Venom movie came out, this agreement didn’t mean the MCU could use Tom Hardy’s Venom, so the movie about one of Spider-Man’s most notorious adversaries took place in a film universe that didn’t explicitly include Tom Holland’s Spider-Man.