Venom 2 Introduces Marvel's Version of Arkham Asylum

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage introduces Marvel's version of Arkham Asylum, the Ravencroft Institute. Sony is pressing ahead with its Spider-Man spinoff movies, buoyed by Venom's strong box office performance. The first film served to establish some of the main characters, focusing on Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock, and it looks as though the sequel will expand the franchise's world.

The Venom 2 trailer has already established some key aspects of Spider-Man lore are part of this world, with several sequences set at the Daily Bugle - apparently a newspaper in this timeline, with the same masthead as the one seen in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, a nice Easter egg. But the trailer also confirms the presence of another important Spider-Man location; it unveils the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane, which essentially serves as Marvel's version of Arkham Asylum. That's a promising addition, and although Ravencroft is shown burning down, that hardly means it's gone for good - it gets destroyed with amusing frequency in the comics.

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Marvel established the history of the Ravencroft Institute back in 2020, in a number of fantastic one-shots and miniseries by Frank Tieri. The land the Ravencroft Institute was built upon has been cursed for generations, with cultists based there dedicated to dark gods ranging from Knull Shuma-Gorath. The original Captain America died on these grounds during the American Civil War, and in the 1890s a Skrull invasion took this as their staging ground. Finally, toward the end of the 19th century Dr. Jonas Ravencroft founded a maximum-security facility for the criminally insane, and it earned a dark reputation right from the start. Staff secretly included the likes of the X-Men villain Mr. Sinister, who used Ravencroft as an opportunity to advance his studies in genetic manipulation. During the Second World War, Ravencroft was taken over by a clandestine government department working with Count Dracula in an attempt to weaponize vampies in order to work for the Allies. The Ravencroft Institute's twisted history really is more insane than any of its inmates.

The Ravencroft Institute was first established in the Spider-Man franchise back in the '90s, when the Spider-Man books became dark and gritty in keeping with the style that was popular at the time. Countless major Spider-Man villains wound up sent to the Ravencroft Institute, and the wall-crawler befriended a scientist who worked there, Dr. Ashley Kafka. Its most dangerous inmate was, of course, Cletus Kasady - the serial killer who bonded with a symbiote and became the monstrous Carnage. But Spider-Man himself wound up there on occasion, and in one notable story he was put on trial at Ravencroft by Dr. Judas Traveller, a powerful being who used Ravencroft and its inmates as part of a dark agenda to understand the nature of evil.

Because the Ravencroft Institute houses villains of such power, it has been destroyed with remarkable frequency. Ravencroft's current director is Norman Osborn, aka the Green Goblin, who's using it as a power base and - like Mr. Sinister before him - a center of experimentation. The Venom 2 trailer may show Ravencroft destroyed, but it could easily be rebuilt for future Sony films, for it would be a welcome addition to this universe.