The week leading up to the release of Venom in early October got off to a worrying start, with early viewers comparing the film to such infamous works as Catwoman and the 2015 Fantastic Four, and the official reviews that followed weren’t much better. Nonetheless, the movie went on to have a record-breaking opening weekend, continued to exceed expectations at the box office in the coming months, and even earned a respectable CinemaScore of B+.
The question is therefore raised of why everyday filmgoers took to Eddie Brock’s solo debut so much better than critics, and according to Venom’s own co-creator Todd McFarlane, the issue might have been generational.
“It was a big roller coaster ride. Visually, everything was coming at you,” Todd McFarlane says. “I think at times… the critics get it wrong in that they forget their age. They come in, and they’re 42 years old, and they come in with their attitude and they’re going, ‘Stop it.’ What if you were 16, 15, and you were watching this movie? You would love it… Of course you would love it.”
As it stands, Venom holds a less-than-impressive score of 29% on Rotten Tomatoes, but as the same site’s audience score of 85% should indicate, Ruben Fleischer’s film generally fared a lot better with comic book fans, including McFarlane himself.
“This thing delivered everything it was supposed to. It was gnarly, it was nasty, it has a big cool Venom, which was what I was looking for,” he continued. “[That] was my bias – I just wanted to see the visualness of Venom that I had created 30 years prior.”
Regardless of whether you stand with the audience consensus or the critical consensus, it’s clear that this won’t be the last we see of Tom Hardy’s take on the symbiote, with writer Jeff Pinkner confirming earlier this month that Venom 2 is in development. If one recent report is anything to go by, then we could be seeing the sequel in theaters as soon as October 2nd, 2020, though not before another Sony/Marvel movie arrives a few months prior.
In any case, Venom‘s post-credits scene has already given us a pretty good idea of what to expect from the follow-up, but in the meantime, McFarlane assures us that “Talks are heating up” for his own Spawn movie.
