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May 19, 2017 Venom By Christopher Roberts

Sony has the film rights to Spider-Man and while they’ve done a deal to incorporate everyone’s favorite wall crawler into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with last year’s Captain America: Civil War and this summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, they still seem intent on making movies on other characters in the Spider-Man universe. Case in point, they have announced today that they are making a standalone movie about Spider-Man villain (and later anti-hero) Venom. The good news is that it will star one of the best actors around, Mad Max and Bane himself, Tom Hardy. The bad news is that it isn’t set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which likely means Spider-Man (currently played by Tom Holland) won’t be anywhere to be found. How they do a movie on Venom, a character whose origin is so intertwined with Spider-Man, is hard to imagine. The news was announced on social media via a black & white photo of Hardy in a Venom T-shirt (see above and below).

Ruben Fleischer (who did Zombieland, yay!, but also did Gangster Squad, boo!) is directing a script by Scott Rosenberg (Pain & Gain, Jumanji) and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2). Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach are producing along with Amy Pascal. Production starts this fall, with an October 5, 2018 release date targeted.

Venom/Eddie Brock first showed up in the Spider-Man comics in the 1980s. The basic idea is that Spider-Man (aka Peter Parker) got a strange new living black alien costume on another planet during the Secret Wars miniseries. The costume started to affect Spider-Man, almost turning him bad, and eventually merged with Eddie Brock, a corrupt rival photographer to Peter Parker, thus forming the villain Venom. Venom/Eddie Brock was previously played by Topher Grace in 2007’s Spider-Man 3, which didn’t go over too well. Hopefully this version will turn out better, but it’s still confounding how it works without having Spider-Man at least in the first quarter of the movie.

Tom Hardy is Eddie Brock in #Venom, the upcoming film from Sony’s Marvel Universe releasing October 5, 2018 - production starts this fall. pic.twitter.com/OZQqDEvoum

— Sony Pictures (@SonyPictures) May 19, 2017

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