'Venom' Movie 2018: Spider-Man Takes on Tom Hardy in New Fan-Made Trailer

With Spider-Man firmly planted in the MCU, Sony is doing its best to launch a new Spidey cinematic universe of its own (seemingly without the web-slinging hero). First up is Venom, which is getting a lot of buzz thanks to its depiction of Tom Hardy as a dark anti-hero who calls his enemies “turds” and runs amok in a version of New York with no Spider-Man in sight.

But with if Spidey wasn’t missing in action? A new fan-made trailer from YouTube account Stryder HD imagines just that, cutting clips of Andrew Garfield’s The Amazing Spider-Man into some of the latest Venom footage. This new trailer is still pretty heavy on Venom, but there’s enough Spidey to build some tension between the two. A few clever cuts really make it seem like the hero and villain are really talking to each other and even fighting.

As for the question of why they chose Andrew Garfield over the iconic Toby Maguire or flavor-of-the-month Tom Holland, Stryder HD simply states that it wasn’t an easy decision. If anything, it probably had more to do with which clips matched up best to Venom’s darker tone.

“I also had a hard time picking which Spider-Man I was going to use,” they explain, “but I think we picked the right one in the end.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time Spider-Man and Venom have gone toe-to-toe in the movies. Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man trilogy, which helped kick off the modern day superhero movie craze, ended with a battle between Maguire’s Spider-Man and Topher Grace’s Venom. That entire movie is a mess, but this fan-made trailer just goes to show that a battle between the two doesn’t have to be so terrible.

Venom hits theaters on October 5.