Sony’s Venom movie is a fascinatingly unknown property at the moment. Despite having begun shooting with an October 5th, 2018 release date in mind, we know very little about what direction they’ll be taking the character in, though we’ve had hints that the studio might be considering an R-rating to truly capture the anti-hero.
Now though, courtesy of the below set photo, we might just have some idea of who Riz Ahmed is going to be playing in the film – and it’s not who everyone thought it was. We’ve known for a while that the Rogue One and Four Lions star would be appearing in the movie, with fans first assuming that he’d be taking on the role of Venom’s even more murderous sibling, Carnage. That was quickly shot down, however and there was also some talk that he might be playing The Chameleon (with a second appearance to come in 2019’s Silver and Black).
Well, it turns out that those were both wrong, as the latest set pic – seen in the gallery below along with a few from earlier this week – comes to us from Atlanta Filming, who confirm that Ahmed is actually playing Dr. Drake.
Longtime Venom fans will recognize that name as referring to Dr. Carlton Drake, head of the Life Foundation. In the Lethal Protector comic series, The Life Foundation captures Venom and extracts five symbiote ‘seeds’ from him, who grow up to become Scream, Phage, Riot, Lasher and Agony. In the source material, they’re foiled when Venom teams up with Spider-Man to take them down, though given the vagaries of who has the rights to Tom Holland’s wall-crawler, it looks unlikely at this point that they’ll go down this particular path.
Even so, the prospect of an all-out symbiote brawl sounds like something to look forward to. Among its many other issues, I never felt that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 did the body horror grossness of the symbiote justice, so let’s hope that director Ruben Fleischer hits that gooey, toothy, drooly sweet spot when Venom slithers into theaters on October 5th.