Venom movie and Spider-Man’s black suit

I know the Venom movie is still playing in theatres right now, so if you haven’t seen it yet, there are going to be spoilers here.

I went to see it with a friend a couple of weeks ago and went into it with mixed feelings. I really liked the thought of a Venom movie, but it just felt wrong that there were no ties to Spider-Man. And even though I thought the movie was very entertaining, I still felt like that after seeing it. I know that it has gotten a lot of on-line criticism because of the lack of Spider-Man, but to me it’s a bit more “personal” and I’ll try to explain why.

I bought my first Marvel comics back in 1984. They were the Dutch translations published by Junior Press and one of the first books I picked up was the Amazing Spider-Man issue where Spidey returns from the first Secret Wars, wearing his new black costume for the first time on earth. I later read some books where he was still in his old red and blue costume (some titles took longer to be published in Dutch) but “my” Spider-Man was the one in black. I thought he looked a lot cooler wearing that and it made him more bad-ass. Of course it turned out to be a symbiote and the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards freed Peter of it, but I always hoped that Spidey would wear it again some time.

Of course Marvel had different plans. Eventually the symbiote bonded with Eddie Brock and Venom was born. What made Venom such a cool villain, in my opinion, was that he knew Spider-Man so well. The symbiote knew everything about Peter, it had his super powers (wall crawling, web shooting etc.) and it was immune to Spidey’s spider sense. And with Eddie being a big, strong guy himself, Venom was also more powerful than Spider-Man. That made him a very dangerous adversary and it made for some great stories. They were very much linked to each other, which you could tell by the big spider symbol on Venom’s chest and back. And now this movie comes out and there is no spider symbol anywhere….

I really didn’t like the Topher Grace version of Venom, because it just wasn’t Eddie Brock. And even though Tom Hardy isn’t that physically impressive either, I think he was a better Eddie Brock than Topher. But at least Topher’s version was tied to Spider-Man. And at least he had a big white spider symbol on his suit.

Marvel took the Venom character in some different directions through the years, including the Flash Thompson version that even was part of the Guardians of the Galaxy at one point, but to me Venom will always be tied to Spider-Man. Maybe not for everyone, but that’s the Venom I grew up with. And since the first movie featuring a certain “superhero” usually contains the origin story of that character, I really felt that Spider-Man should have been part of that.

I realise that it all has to do with movie rights. But why would you make a movie about a character so closely tied to Spider-Man if you can’t use Spidey himself? Apparently the new Joker movie is not going to feature Batman either. I honestly believe that a big part of every great superhero is his rogues gallery and Spider-Man has a whole bunch of classic villains. And that’s exactly what Venom still is in my opinion: a great Spider-Man villain.

I guess that’s just my problem. Or at least just the problem that long time comic book readers have with this movie. My friend, who I saw the movie with, is more of a movie fan and has never really read any superhero comics and he enjoyed the movie for what it is. And another friend, who saw it some time later, also had no problem with it. They just saw a fun and action packed movie and didn’t care about the missing spider symbol on Venom’s suit. But I did… That’s why I hope that we’ll eventually see a Spider-Man/Venom crossover, even though that seems very unlikely at this moment.