Venom Director Admits That The Movie Has One Big Plot Hole

Whatever your personal opinions about Venom, you have to admit it’s far from being one of the smartest superhero movies around as, despite Tom Hardy’s committed performance, it’s got a kind of dumb, adolescent energy that – depending on your tastes – is either endearing or a fatal flaw.

One way in which this is obvious is a massive plot hole that glares the audience in the face. After Eddie’s initial encounter with Carlton Drake, the film jumps forward six months. The only problem is that when it next checks in on Riot, it’s still possessing the same old woman in Malaysia. Seeing as the symbiote is on a single-minded mission to track down the Life Foundation in the U.S., it makes no sense that it’s been doing nothing for half a year.

While speaking to GameSpot, director Ruben Fleischer was asked to explain this plot hole, and unfortunately, he wasn’t able to. Instead, the filmmaker laughed off the issue and admitted that Venom does have a “few logic bumps” that don’t “entirely track.”

“Our idea was that Riot was using up the life force of whoever he took, and then he jumped ship when he’d consumed them and then find a new host to carry him further on his journey. That’s a good question. That’s one of our few – hopefully – few logic bumps. But we had to have a passage of time in order to show Eddie’s downfall, and that was the one thing that doesn’t entirely track.”

The director then went on to offer a half-hearted explanation for the plot hole, suggesting that Riot just enjoyed hanging around in this old lady’s body, slicing and dicing its way through the population of Malaysia.

“But I like to think that old lady was going around murdering all throughout Malaysia, and she was just having a good old time just shooting shards through different people in Malaysia.”

That’s a decent attempt to fill the hole, but unfortunately it doesn’t fit the established rules. We’re told throughout the movie that only a true symbiosis – like that between Eddie and Venom or Carlton and Riot – is sustainable. As such, this old lady shouldn’t have been able to live for so long. So nice try, Ruben, but that doesn’t quite cut it, either.

Admittedly, it’s refreshing that Fleischer is so honest about the fact that Venom has plot holes, but if he recognized that they were there, it’s a shame he didn’t think to smooth them over with his writers during production.