Sony had some ambitious plans for the Spider-Man movie universe when they were in full control. They planned on making a handful of direct sequels to The Amazing Spider-Man movies and spin-offs that would center around The Sinister Six and a variety of other characters, one of which was the popular Spider-Man villain Venom. Many assumed the Venom movie was scrapped after Sony joined forces with Marvel Studios and canned all future Spider-Man films. Turns out, the movie is still coming and it's right around the corner.
Sony has announced that the untitled Venom movie will be coming on October 5th, 2018 which means that they'll probably begin shooting very soon. The movie currently has no director but it does have a script that was written by Scott Rosenberg (writer of Gone in Sixty Seconds and Con Air) and Jeff Pinker (writer of The Amazing Spider-Man 2). One can imagine we'll learn more at San Diego Comic-Con this summer.
It's unclear if this will be connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or if Spider-Man will even appear. Sony does intend to make a film franchise off Venom, however.
For those unaware, Venom is like the anti-Spider-Man. He possesses similar abilities to Spider-Man but is faster and stronger. He's evil and has no boundaries and in some incarnations, he even consumes human beings. It'll be interesting to see how dark Sony goes with this adaptation as they could make it a hard R or make it PG-13 to allow for larger audiences to see it.
