‘Venom’ Will Be An R-Rated Sci-Fi Horror Movie
By Peter Sciretta/March 27, 2017 11:30 am EST
My Entertainment World is claiming that the film will start shooting this fall, revealing that the project is in the genre of “Action/Horror/Sci-fi.”
It’s a shame that Sony couldn’t (or maybe didn’t want to?) work out a deal with Disney to try to build their Spider-Man universe into something bigger, something that works within the existing Marvel Cinematic Universe. But if it is true that Sony is developing Venom as an R-rated horror film, this shows that they’re trying something different to differentiate their Marvel movies from what is being done at Disney. I think the biggest mistake Sony could make is to try to beat Disney at their own game when they need to be designing their own game entirely.
Of course, the MPAA doesn’t rate a film until it’s finished and right now Venom only exists as a screenplay. It’s possible that, once a filmmaker comes on board, he could alter this vision. But with a 2018 release date in place, I wonder much much time they’ll have for significant changes.
After the project was first announced a couple of weeks back, we were so unsure of what that movie would even look like. So we delved into the comic books for ideas of what a Venom movie might be. Alex Riviello theorized that we could see a movie similar to John Carpenter’s The Thing:
Venom will be released in theaters on October 5, 2018.
Fans might not appreciate Sony going with the story from this 2003 18-issue Venom series. That’s because it’s one of those terribly comic book-y stories where it’s eventually revealed that it wasn’t the real Venom all along, but an imposter. Still, it’s got what it takes to make a fun sci-fi/horror superhero flick, especially with the number of homages to classic movies it contains. That’s obvious from the start, which kicks off in an arctic outpost that gets overrun by the symbiote. It’s blatantly borrowing from John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece, The Thing, but there are certainly far worse movies from which to derive inspiration! It even takes over a dog at one point. The symbiote goes from one host to the next, making the remaining survivors paranoid as it takes them all over. It eventually makes it to civilization (after a stop in Canada to mess with Wolverine, natch), finding Eddie Brock in NYC and forcing a two-way Venom fight. If they needed a standalone story, this could be it. While a couple of familiar superheroes show up, they really don’t need any additional characters to tell this story. Plus, it could serve as an origin story if they so chose.
