Venom was released on October 4. This movie is the first of several anti-hero and villain spin-offs of the Spider-Man franchise. These spin-offs will feature little to no involvement from Spider-Man himself.

A Venom movie without Spider-Man is seemingly hard to pull off. Comic book lovers and Marvel movie connoisseurs nation-wide did not embrace the idea leading up to the release date. Expectations were set low for the movie as a whole.

Here’s what Valencia Film Production Technology students thought:

“I think it was fine without Spider-Man,” says 18-year old Jon-Marco Mendoza, “I thought the movie was gonna be trash, but it wasn’t as bad. It was okay. I was expecting Spider-Man to be in the credit scenes or something, but I guess not.”

19-year-old Richard Utria says, “You can’t really have a Spider-Man universe, because that’s what they’re trying to do, without Spider-Man. So, they’re trying to have this new sinister scene with Venom, The Vulture, and Doc Ock, and there’s no Spider-Man so what are they forming for?”

“I don’t judge it whether Spider-Man will be in it or not, it’s mostly just on what the trailer looks like, what everybody is saying, because people have not been saying good things about it,” says 18-year old Dan Ingram, “Tom Holland is fantastic as Spider-Man and has been doing really well so it probably would have helped the movie a lot. I’m excited to see it, but not in the way that’s ‘Oh my gosh this is gonna be so good’ I’m excited so that I can talk about it, so that I really know what I think.”

“I like the personality they gave Venom. If they can make it a stand-alone character in the comics, I think they can do it in film. I heard they cut 40 minutes out of the movie to make it PG-13, I want to see those cuts,” says 20-year-old Shane Brin.