Spider-Man spinoff 'Venom' coming in 2018, for real this time?

Sony's still high on Venom, the Spider-Man spinoff that's been in the works for the past decade. They're so confident about it, in fact, that they've gone ahead and set a release date: Mashable has confirmed that Sony plans to open Venom on October 5, 2018.

The studio announced the Venom release Thursday, just hours after Warner Bros.' Aquaman vacated that October 5 slot for December 2018. (Meanwhile, Sony's The Girl in the Spider's Web – a Girl With the Dragon Tattoo that has nothing to do with Spider-Man – moved from October 5, 2018 to October 19, 2018.)

Which all sounds well and good, but longtime Spidey fans may recall we've been down this road before. Venom made his live-action big-screen debut in 2007's Spider-Man 3, where he was played by Topher Grace opposite Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. Talk of a potential Venom spinoff began not long after that.

Those conversations died down a bit once Sony decided to abandon the continuity established in that first Spider-Man trilogy ... only to fire up again once Sony rebooted the franchise in 2012 with star Andrew Garfield ... and then die down again once Sony ditched that iteration so that Spidey could join the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Put another way: Yes, this means Sony's been stuck on Venom since two Spider-Men ago. You see why we're a bit skeptical.

On the bright side, things are looking rosy for this latest version of Spider-Man, who's played by 20-year-old British actor Tom Holland. He stole the show in last year's Captain America: Civil War, and is all set to embark on his first solo adventure this summer in Spider-Man: Homecoming.

But there's a catch. While Venom seems perfectly positioned to capitalize on the Marvel superhero's renewed prominence, earlier reports indicated it won't actually have anything to do with this Spider-Man. Venom won't be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and won't have anything to do with Holland's version of the character. It will, however, be intended to launch its own standalone franchise.

And as if that's not confusing enough, Sony's also got an animated Spider-Man movie in the works for December 2018. That one centers on Miles Morales, not Peter Parker, and has nothing to do with Venom or Spider-Man: Homecoming as far as we know.

Venom is a classic character strongly associated with Spider-Man in the comics. He first appeared as simply a black version of the Spidey suit but was soon revealed to be an alien symbiote that was using Peter Parker as a host. The best-known Venom host, however, is probably Eddie Brock, the character played by Grace in Spider-Man 3.

We'll see if this latest version sticks.