Now that the social media embargo has now been lifted on the new Venom movie, we can finally see what early audiences thought of Eddie Brock’s first standalone film and the results are pretty painful to read, with such infamous titles as Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four and Catwoman being thrown around for comparison.
While we may not have expected the initial response to be quite this brutal, the signs were certainly there that the Ruben Fleischer-helmed film wasn’t going to be received too warmly by the fans, most notably Sony’s questionable decision to aim for a PG-13 rating instead of an R. Another development that many took as a bad omen was a recent quote from Tom Hardy, in which the Venom star seemed to suggest that his favorite scenes from the film didn’t make the final cut.
Call it damage control if you will, but now Hardy’s back to clarify his earlier statement, explaining that nothing is truly missing from the film itself, except some extra footage of the actor improvising and having fun with the role.
“What I’m saying is that I had a lot of time improvising and a lot of time playing with Venom so in honesty there’s probably about seven hours or more of the footage with me playing as Venom and enjoying myself,” Hardy said. “I took him right out there and played with it and had a lot of fun because there’s a lot of fun you can have with a project and with this character and I’ve done that. And me, and the other executive producers know full well that has nothing to do with the story, but nevertheless would I like to watch a seven hour version of Venom? Yep, but that’s just me as an actor but the truth of it is everything that we wanted is in the story Everything I want is in the story and more and the film is awesome and I’m excited and I just want to shoot a sequel.”
If the general public is as unsatisfied with the new movie as its earliest viewers are, you have to wonder if Sony will have much of an incentive to bring out a second Venom. As it stands, the studio has a whole cinematic universe planned around this film, but if this first entry fails to garner sufficient box office returns and fan enthusiasm, then there’s always the chance that this comic book world will go the way of Universal’s Dark Universe.
But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s see how Venom fares when it hits theaters on October 5th.
