How Venom’s Director Made Sure The Symbiote Looked Different From Spider-Man 3

Venom might be the character’s first solo movie, but it’s not his first cinematic appearance. That happened 11 years ago in Spider-Man 3, even though fans have been trying to forget that Topher Grace’s take on the iconic villain happened ever since. Naturally, the makers of the new film wanted to distance themselves from Sam Raimi’s misguided outing with the character, and a major way this was done was to make sure that the actual symbiote creature looked as different as possible.

Director Ruben Fleischer spoke to CinemaBlend recently and revealed that the visual development of Venom was a long process and one thing he pushed for was to go back to the comics instead of copying anything done in Spider-Man 3. It also helped that CG technology has come along in leaps and bounds since 2007.

“The process of creating Venom as a fully CG character was the leap of faith from the beginning. In Spider-Man 3, they did it practically and we knew that we wanted to distinguish our movie from that movie. And also technology has evolved so much in that time that it felt like we could do a photo-real Venom for this movie. … But yeah, it was a long process. The thing that we luckily had as a touchstone was just the way he looks in the comics. And I was really specific about, you know, there’s many iterations of Venom. So I was really specific about which comics we wanted to draw from, providing them with tons of panels to use as inspiration.”

One complaint about the depiction of Venom in Spider-Man 3 is that he lacked the hulking size that made him such an instantly ominous threat on the page. This has definitely been fixed for Venom, as the trailers have made clear that this symbiote is much taller and bulkier than the one seen in SM3‘s final act.

That said, though the visuals might be better, the rest of Venom might not have hit the mark that Sony and Fleischer were going for. Reviews came in this week and they’re not pretty, to say the least. Critics have descried it as “poorly conceived,” “painful” and “frustrating,” though Tom Hardy has been praised in the central role. In fact, the movie currently sits at a 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a fair drop from Spider-Man 3‘s respectable 63%.

We’ll have to wait and see if the box office is strong enough to warrant a sequel, otherwise, that’ll make it two false starts for Venom after Spider-Man 3.