Tom Holland Says Insomniac's Symbiote Suit Sets a Tough Bar for Live-Action

Holland Is Genuinely Stumped

Tom Holland has a lot of confidence about playing Spider-Man. The prospect of a live-action symbiote suit, though, is a different story.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Holland said that Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 set a standard he’s not sure any film production could clear. “I think if we ever got to do a black suit in Spider-Man, I don’t know how we would tackle that challenge,” Holland said. “They did it so well in [Marvel’s Spider-Man 2], and I don’t know how you make a suit that’s similar to the one in the game without having a CG component. I don’t know how you would do that.”

That’s a striking thing to hear from the guy whose job it would be to wear the suit. And it speaks to something that fans have been quietly wrestling with for years: what, exactly, should the symbiote look like?

The Cloth vs. Goo Debate

As IGN notes, there is real contention over the symbiote’s visual presentation. One camp wants something more textile and practical, closer to what Tobey Maguire wore in Spider-Man 3 back in 2007. Holland specifically praised that suit, calling it a high point. The other camp wants something alien and fluid, the kind of living, breathing darkness that Insomniac leaned into hard for their 2023 game.

If Marvel went the gooey route, Holland’s hesitation makes complete sense. That look is genuinely difficult to achieve without heavy visual effects, and MCU fans have developed a complicated relationship with CG suits over the years. Holland’s previous Spider-Man outfits were digitally smoothed to the point where, as IGN reported, they lost a lot of their physical character. The texture, the wear, the feeling that a real person was inside the thing.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day appears to have course-corrected on that front. According to IGN, the film leans into practical imperfections: wrinkles that move as Spidey swings, the faint outline of Peter’s ears pressing against the fabric, even the visible shape of his eyes through the lens material. Small details, but they add up to something that feels inhabited rather than rendered.

A gooey, alien symbiote suit would require abandoning almost all of that in favor of effects work. It’s not impossible, but it would mean accepting a very different aesthetic than the one Brand New Day just worked hard to establish.

The Groundwork Is Already There

Here’s the thing: the MCU already has a symbiote in play. At the conclusion of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Hardy’s Venom was briefly transported to the MCU before being pulled back to his own universe. He did not leave empty-handed, so to speak. A fragment of the symbiote remained behind in the MCU, sitting somewhere, waiting.

Whether it ever finds its way to Peter Parker is still an open question. One plausible path runs through Avengers: Secret Wars, which is the comics storyline where Peter famously bonds with the alien suit in the first place. Marvel’s track record with adaptation means none of that is guaranteed, but it’s at least a narrative on-ramp that exists.

For now, Holland’s comments suggest that even within Marvel’s own walls, the symbiote question is more open than fans might hope. It’s not just a matter of story timing. It’s a genuine creative and technical puzzle, and at least one of the people who would have to solve it in front of a camera is openly uncertain about the answer. The Insomniac team spent years crafting something visually spectacular with essentially no physical constraints. Live-action comes with a few more of those.