Venom is a Marvel symbiote villain who bonds with a human host, most famously Eddie Brock, and the 2018 Sony film trailer turned him into a meme subject.

Where did Venom come from?

The character debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #299 in April 1988, but the modern meme wave started with Sony's 2018 trailer rollout.

What does Venom mean?

In meme context, Venom usually refers to the 2018 Tom Hardy design mocked for its long tongue and dead-looking eyes, often with cartoon googly eyes Photoshopped on.

How do you use Venom?

People typically grab a trailer still, add cartoon googly eyes or a horny/innuendo caption, and compare the result to Topher Grace's 2007 version for the 'glow up' joke.

Is Venom still popular?

The 2018 tongue and googly-eyes formats are still referenced as classic trailer-reaction memes, with the original tweets from @MatthewGaydos and @WH_Woolhat still circulating.

Venom

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Published October 4, 2026

Venom is a Marvel symbiote and Spider-Man villain whose 2018 standalone film trailer kicked off a wave of jokes about his massive tongue and lifeless eyes. Twitter and Tumblr turned the character into a running punchline, with Photoshopped googly-eye edits and 'glow up' comparisons to Topher Grace's widely panned 2007 version becoming the dominant memes of the pre-release cycle.

marvel character design memes photoshop memes villain memes 2018 memes

Overview

The Venom meme wave is less about the Marvel character himself and more about how the internet reacted to his design in the 2018 Sony film starring Tom Hardy. After the full trailer dropped on April 23rd, 2018, viewers zeroed in on Venom's dangling tongue and blank white eyes, treating the character as unintentionally funny or sexual rather than scary1 2.

Two image formats carried most of the humor. The first was straight tongue jokes, where users captioned screenshots with innuendo or compared Venom's face to famously nervous or horny expressions. The second was 'googly eyes Venom,' a Photoshop format that pasted cartoon eyes over Venom's blank sclera to make him look confused, sad, or deranged1 3. A parallel joke format compared Hardy's CGI version to Topher Grace's much-maligned 2007 Venom from Spider-Man 3, framed as a 'glow up' despite poor reviews for both4.

The tone across all variants was affectionate ridicule. Fans weren't dunking on Venom so much as adopting him as a goofy mascot, which only intensified when Hardy himself gave bizarre press interviews about '30 to 40 minutes' of cut footage, including 'mad puppeteering scenes'5.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Twitter / Tumblr (viral spread)

Date

2018

Venom first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #299 in April 1988 as an alien symbiote bonded to disgraced reporter Eddie Brock4. Sony announced a standalone live-action film in March 2016 with Dante Harper writing, and in May 2017 Deadline reported Tom Hardy had been cast as Brock under director Ruben Fleischer6. The meme itself traces to the trailer rollout: Sony dropped the teaser on February 8th, 2018, and the full trailer on April 23rd, 2018, racking up more than 19 million YouTube views in 24 hours4.

Within a day of the full trailer, the tongue jokes were everywhere. On April 23rd, Twitter user @helen posted the trailer still with the caption 'how i'm tryna get my pussy ate'7, and film reporter Scott Wampler paired Venom with Willem Dafoe's nervous Golden Globes face8. The googly-eyes format solidified later: Twitter user @WH_Woolhat posted a transformation GIF with cartoon eyes on April 14th that eventually passed 31,000 likes9, and on August 1st @MatthewGaydos tweeted 'But what if Venom had eyes?' with Photoshopped stills, hitting over 160,000 likes in two days10.

How It Spread

The tongue and 'pornographic Venom' takes dominated the first 48 hours. Tumblr user darthdpool annotated the trailer still with multiple joke captions, and royalysl's side-by-side 'BEST GLOW UP I'VE EVER SEEN' comparing Hardy's Venom to Topher Grace's 2007 version pulled more than 3,600 notes in a day4. The jokes crossed into mainstream outlets quickly, with ComicBook.com1 and The Daily Dot2 both running pieces on the googly-eyes trend by late April.

The second viral wave hit in August 2018 when @MatthewGaydos's googly-eyes Photoshops went viral, prompting reply-chain captions. @IceSnipe tagged one 'Me looking at food after an exhausting day'11 and @Altruest_ wrote 'Mom said it's my turn to play the Nintendo'12. Twitter ran an official Moments page compiling the edits on August 2nd, cementing the format4.

Press commentary around the film itself fed the fire. Tom Hardy's September 2018 interview about missing 'puppeteering scenes' became its own joke, then IGN got him to walk it back saying 'Everything I want is in it. And more.'5. The film opened October 5th, 2018, to a 31% Rotten Tomatoes score with critics calling it 'chaotic, noisy'13 and a 35 on Metacritic14, but the memes outlasted the reviews.

Timeline

1988-04

Venom debuts as a Spider-Man villain in Amazing Spider-Man #299.

2007

Topher Grace plays Venom in Spider-Man 3, later used as the 'before' half of 2018's glow-up jokes.

2017-05-19

Deadline reports Tom Hardy will play Eddie Brock in Sony's Venom.

Venom

Overview

Gallery

Origin & Background

How It Spread

Frequently Asked Questions

References (14)