It would be fair to say that audiences are enjoying Venom: Let There Be Carnage a lot more than critics, looking at the disparities in the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes scores. Admittedly, that was to be expected when the concept of an odd couple story with romantic comedy elements set in the superhero genre where the conflict stems from the disagreements between a neurotic reporter and his symbiotic life partner hardly screams ‘prestige drama’.
Let There Be Carnage might not be going down in the history books as an all-time classic, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun. After the first installment earned in excess of $850 million at the box office, Sony clearly allowed writers Kelly Marcel and Tom Hardy to take the shackles off.
In a new interview with DiscussingFilm, Marcel admitted that her intention going in was to create and deliver a batsh*t insane roller coaster ride that would leave fans breathless from the first minute to last.
“We just wanted this to be an epic ride from beginning to end. We wanted to leave you breathless at the end of it as if you had literally just been on a roller coaster and came thinking that was the most insane batsh*t ride you’ve ever been on. This movie goes like a freight train and I don’t know that you could sustain much more of that ride if you went longer.
Also, you have to bear in mind that not only do we have to tell the story of what Eddie and Venom are now and what the dynamic is between them, but we also need to bring Carnage into this movie fairly early on, because that’s who you come to see. We didn’t want to push his arrival too late into the movie in order to have a longer runtime, and so we just told the story that we wanted to tell, in the amount of pages that we wanted to tell it in. I think when you see it, you’ll think actually this is the perfect amount of time for something that is this energetic.”
Marcel definitely succeeded in her goal, with Venom: Let There Be Carnage‘s thrifty 97-minute running time giving it a frenetic pace we don’t often see from a genre that can regularly become to bogged down by world-building and over-explanation. Bigger doesn’t always mean better, and Andy Serkis’ sequel more than proves it.
