Production is currently underway on Sony’s Venom movie starring Tom Hardy. Fans wondered how you could have Venom without Spider-Man, who is kind of the progenitor of the character in the comics. The whole reason Venom has Spider-Man-like powers is because the alien symbiote went to Peter Parker first and when Peter rejected the symbiote, it found Eddie Brock, thus creating a darker, more muscular, and drool-ier version of Spider-Man. But we heard repeatedly, especially out of the Spider-Man: Homecoming junket, that the new Spider-Man played by Tom Holland exists in a separate universe than Venom and all the other Spidey spinoffs Sony has in the works.

Today on Movie Talk, Jon Schnepp said he heard a very different story and that Holland’s Spider-Man will in fact be in Venom:

“Spider-Man is going to be in Venom. For the last couple of months, we’ve been hearing how Sony is keeping it all separated, and Spider-Man is in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but every other character that’s in the Spider-Man universe is separate. All I’m saying is that Spider-Man—and I’m talking about Tom Holland’s Spider-Man—is going to be in Venom.”

Holland along with producers Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal both said that Spider-Man wouldn’t appear in Venom, and that it wouldn’t even be a cameo role. And when you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. Think of all the complications that arise once you say Spider-Man and Venom exist in the same universe. For starters, Venom is going to be Rated-R, so now Disney has the Spider-Man character appearing in an R-rated movie. Secondly, every future MCU movie featuring Spider-Man now carries the burden of, “Where’s Venom?” So now you’re saddling your future Spider-Man movies with Venom stuff even though Feige and Co. aren’t involved with the making of those Venom movies.

It just doesn’t really add up. I could see, at best, a mention of Spider-Man or maybe a costumed Spider-Man where the costume design is different enough from Homecoming that there’s no confusion, but to firmly put Tom Holland into Venom just opens a can of worms that both Sony and Disney probably don’t want to deal with.

We’ll find out if this rumor turns out to be true when Venom opens on October 5th.