Venom Star Tom Hardy Defends The Film’s PG-13 Rating

Venom is a menacing figure with some pretty gruesome habits, but for his first feature film, the alien symbiote will have to tone down the violence a little and watch his language, too, because his upcoming standalone movie has been given a PG-13 rating.

In an era where Sony’s competitors at Fox are currently embracing the R for grisly spectacles like Logan and Deadpool 2, this news has come as a disappointment to many fans, but star Tom Hardy assures us that there’s still room for Venom to get pretty dark while still appealing to younger audiences.

“Is it going to be R-Rated? That’s the big question and the answers been answered, isn’t it? (It’s a 15 in the UK) and it’s a PG-13 in the states, but to be fair the thing can fulcrum into R-Rated and fulcrum into youth or children,” Hardy told MTV. “My littlest ones, they watch Spider-Man and Venom quite comfortably and Venom toys appear and LEGO appear. So it’s not like they’re scared by him, and at the same time there’s a lot in the real estate that you can actually imbue with a complete sense of gratuitous violence if you really wanted to, and I think you’ve got the right people for that job if you want to push it, course that’s where I want to go with it.”

If all goes well for Venom at the box office – and early projections suggest that it very much will – then there may be time in future movies for Eddie Brock’s escapades to up the bloodiness, seeing how Hardy’s currently signed on for a trilogy of these movies.

At the same time, financially speaking, you could argue that it would be in Sony’s best interests to stick with the PG-13 rating for the sequels, too. Not only would this open the film up to a broader range of moviegoers, but also gives the character a better chance of crossing over with the Disney-approved MCU and fulfill Hardy’s desire to collaborate with the Avengers.

In any case, regardless of what you think of the movie’s softer rating, director Ruben Fleischer and the team still have the potential to start Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters off on a strong note. And we’ll see if Venom can transcend its lack of gore when it hits theaters on October 5th.