After Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 struggled under the weight of an overstuffed narrative, Sony rebooted the franchise and managed to do the same thing in even quicker time. The Amazing Spider-Man was an entertaining enough reintroduction for the iconic superhero, and the material was greatly elevated by the performances of leads Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, but the sequel almost collapsed into itself.

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There was far too much going on, with the studio eying an expanded universe of their own to rival Marvel at the expense of the story they were telling, which resulted in an overblown and overlong second installment that disappointed critically and commercially, leading to yet another reboot that saw Tom Holland fare much better as part of the MCU.

Had Andrew Garfield stuck around and made The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and 4, though, which had already been given release dates before the second movie even arrived, then there’s every chance Sony could’ve gone down the symbiote route again, and new fan art from SPDRMNKYXXIII imagines how the actor might have looked in the iconic black suit, which you can see below.

The studio already forced the symbiote subplot upon an unsuspecting Sam Raimi, who had no interest whatsoever in Venom, but perhaps Marc Webb would have been much more receptive to the idea had The Amazing Spider-Man franchise not ended up being cut short in a very similar manner to its predecessor as the grubby fingerprints of studio interference ultimately blighted the final product.

In any case, the future of the assimilating alien lifeform currently lies in the more than capable hands of Tom Hardy, with Eddie Brock’s alter ego now at the forefront of the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters.