[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home.]

Spider-Man: No Way Home capped off Jon Watts’ trilogy on a dour note for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, leaving him without any friends or family who remember him or any of the Stark tech that helped him become an Avenger. The ending finds Peter alone, broke, and literally without a friend in the world, but no shortage of new enemies on the horizon. For him, being a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is about to get a lot more difficult. He might need a helping (parasitic) hand from the “Lethal Protector”.

The ending of Venom: Let There Be Carnage finds a flustered Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom seemingly transported into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by a “strange” phenomenon, with the worldwide reveal of Peter Parker’s identity, in particular, catching the ever-hungry symbiote’s attention. In the mid-credits scene of No Way Home, Brock and his parasitic pal are receiving a crash-course in MCU history (Iron Man, Hulk, Thanos, etc.) and decide to pay the New York web-slinger a visit. Almost immediately, thanks to another spell from the sorcerer supreme, they are whisked away back to their own Sony-verse, leaving only a small drop of the black symbiote behind in the MCU.

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This begs the question, is Venom finally in the MCU now? Although the back-to-back appearances of Hardy’s Venom in Let There Be Carnage and No Way Home may come across as a bait-and-switch, teeing up a multiversal showdown between Holland and Hardy and then immediately reneging on it, it does establish that a form of the Venom symbiote is now loose on an unsuspecting MCU with its eyes set on Peter Parker. Whether or not Hardy’s Venom specifically will be facing off against Holland’s Spidey still remains a question.

In an interview with ScreenRant, Tom Hardy expressed interest in melding his own Sony-verse with the ever-expanding MCU:

“We will always [be] looking to campaign to play with that with all the brothers and sisters who are out there, do you know what I mean? Whether we can connect the dots, that's up to the constellations, and that's above my pay grade, but we would be remiss not to think about that when we're working on the material.”

In that same spirit, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige spoke with Collider about the potential presented by the success of Sony’s two Venom films:

"You look at the obvious comic connotations between Venom and Spider-Man and it is inherent. So, the minute Sony made their Venom movie and it worked as well as it did, and Tom Hardy became as iconic as he has become as Venom, then the obvious question is then, 'How do we start to merge them?'"

Regardless of if Tom Hardy will exactly be involved, both Sony and Marvel have demonstrated interest in injecting the MCU with the venomous symbiote, leaving the possibilities open for both universes to share in the lethal mayhem. Where No Way Home left Peter Parker’s story places him in a more desperate situation than he has ever been in the MCU. With Peter Parker in a more dire need of help than ever, the need for a power-enhancing black suit of alien origin is perfectly poised to appear in Spidey’s future, and the deadly repercussions that come with it.