It’s hard to feel too badly for a movie that’s managed to rake in over $200 million on its opening weekend, but no one can deny that Venom has been the subject of a whole lot of hate and ridicule in this last week. Once the social media embargo was lifted for the symbiote’s first standalone outing, the floodgates opened and out poured an onslaught of highly disparaging tweets, and the official reviews that followed weren’t any more generous.
Still, as we said above, the Ruben Fleischer-helmed flick is getting off to a promising start at the box office, breaking the October opening weekend record both domestically and internationally. What’s more, while the critics have been pretty hard on this one, the movie’s fared a lot better with general audiences, who gave it a respectable CinemaScore of B+.
And it seems that Venom’s creator is pretty pleased with it, too. Speaking to IGN in a recent interview, Todd McFarlane explained that for him, there was only one thing he wanted to see in the film, and it delivered on that.
For Venom, I only wanted one thing. I was very simple. Please, for the love of God, make him big. Right? Because when I designed him he was big, he was like a house. So Spider-Man was skinny, Venom was big, and so you couldn’t have a physical fight because Venom would win and so now Spider-Man has to get intellectually smart to beat him. Please, please, please give me something big and I saw big. So I had one big box and they checked it for me. I saw a big Venom onscreen more than once. It was cool.
We have to agree with the comic book legend here. Venom certainly made the titular beast a lot more intimidating and threatening in size than when we last saw him (Spider-Man 3). In fact, for all of the criticism aimed against the film, Fleischer and his team actually got a lot about the character right, and in many ways, it was a much better take on the symbiote than Sam Raimi’s aforementioned movie gave us.
That being said, the film surrounding Tom Hardy’s portrayal of Venom wasn’t exactly a smooth ride, with nonsensical plot beats, questionable dialogue and cheap-looking CGI spread throughout, but given how well it performed at the box office, a sequel seems all but a guarantee at this point. Just don’t expect it to have an R-rating.
