Barring the back-and-forth surrounding the film’s relation to the MCU – or lack thereof – Venom has piqued the curiosity of comic book fans the world over thanks to Sony and Ruben Fleischer’s desire to engineer a dark and potentially R-rated Spider-Man spinoff.
Not only that, but there have been rumblings that Venom, a movie that will see Dunkirk star Tom Hardy wrestle with the alien symbiote, will be more horror-oriented in nature, and that’s something that Columbia Pictures president Sanford Panitch echoed in a new interview with Variety.
The exhaustive report essentially places the blistering success of Spider-Man: Homecoming under the microscope, before analyzing how Jon Watts’ triumph will be used as a springboard from which Sony will launch its own Marvel Universe, beginning with the release of Venom next October. It’s a movie with “with and a dark element,” according to Panitch, who went on to name-drop both John Carpenter and David Cronenberg – two titans of the horror genre – as creative inspirations for Eddie Brock’s solo movie.
Per Variety:
I’ve always been drawn to the more antihero superheroes. There’s a dark element to [Venom] and a wit that has always appealed to me.
When asked how Eddie Brock (Hardy) comes into contact with the symbiote, Panitch remained mum, but the executive did point to the inner conflict that rages between Eddie and Venom once that symbiote takes hold.
They become almost a third being, which is what Venom is. There’s a famous quote: ‘You’re Eddie Brock. I’m the symbiote. Together we are Venom.’
Casting is now underway for Sony’s Venom spinoff, and there have been suggestions that Ruben Fleischer’s anti-hero movie will make room for a second symbiote host as well. We’ll find out if that’s indeed the case on October 5th, 2018.
