Sony’s upcoming Venom was an already contentious property due to its distance from the MCU, but the controversy surrounding it only increased after the release of the first teaser trailer. Despite the title, the preview didn’t feature the actual character of Venom at all, only showing us Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock before his transformation into the black-clad anti-hero.
Naturally, fans heavily criticized this decision – and one of those is all-round superhero expert Kevin Smith. The director spoke with his co-host Ralph Garman on their podcast Hollywood Babble-On about recent trailers like Solo: A Star Wars Story and Avengers: Infinity War. Though they loved the footage from those films, the hosts were more conflicted about Venom, as Smith summed up most people’s thoughts with this comment on the trailer:
“I didn’t see a Venom trailer. I saw Tom Hardy: The Movie.”
Of course, some fans are defending the preview for withholding the reveal of its star – after all, it’s only a teaser rather than the first full-length promo for the movie. Even with that explanation, though, Smith isn’t having it.
“It’s a teaser, but you can’t call the movie Venom and not show Venom.”
It wasn’t all bad, though, as Smith did have some positive things to say. As you probably know, many fans are complaining about the decision to jump straight to Brock possessing the Venom symbiote, rather than exploring Peter Parker’s period of wearing it as his black Spider-Man suit, which was detailed in the comics in the Secret Wars arc and previously seen in the movies in Spider-Man 3. Smith isn’t of the opinion that this is necessary, though, and went on to praise the brief glimpse of the symbiote we did get in the Venom teaser.
“So, there’s been questions about how do you tell the story, like you can’t tell it the way it was told in the comics unless you do the Secret Wars story, so everyone is wondering how the f*** is he going to become Venom and they showed the symbiote in the trailer trapped in the glass jar. It looked kind of badass.”
To be fair to Sony, the most likely reason there was no Venom in the preview is that the CGI for the character isn’t up to scratch yet. However, given the backlash against the teaser, it might have been worth their while to wait until the effects were finished before showing off any footage from the movie.
You can’t turn back time though and it is what it is, and now we’ll just have to hope that the next trailer does a bit of a better job getting people hyped up for Venom, which hits theaters this October.