When Sony Pictures took the stage at Comic-Con Experience 2017 in Sao Paolo, Brazil on Saturday, fans were merely expecting an initial trailer for the animated Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse movie. But to their surprise, what they also got was some juicy details about the upcoming Venom movie.
While no footage was revealed, director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) and star Tom Hardy appeared live via satellite to shed some light on what to expect, namely what comic books the film will be taking its primary storyline from. Fleischer explained that the film will primarily be based on two comic book runs: Lethal Protector and Planet Of The Symbiotes.
The former is a six-issue series by David Michelinie and Mark Bagley released in 1993. The story sees Peter Parker and Venom agreeing to leave each other alone as long as Venom doesn’t commit any more crimes, so Venom packs up, and leaves New York City for San Francisco.
Venom ends up teaming up with Spider-Man to tackle five new offspring of the Venom Symbiote: Scream, Phage, Riot, Lasher and Agony. But we know Spider-Man won’t be appearing in the Venom film, so don’t expect a pure adaptation. Perhaps this one will just be taking the initial agreement between the two enemies and the move to San Francisco to the big screen.
Planet Of The Symbiotes was a five-issue series also written by Michelinie published in 1995 under the Amazing Spider-Man banner. That story focused on earth being invaded by an army of symbiotes with Venom teaming up with Spider-Man and Scarlet Spider to stop them.
So while we now have the comics that the film will be using as source material, details are still pretty vague, as we know Spider-Man can’t appear, so his comic appearances must be removed or rejigged somehow, plus Carnage has been rumoured to be the villain of the film and he is nowhere to be seen in either comic series.
Filming is underway, though everything is very under wraps. We do know that Hardy will at least be partially using motion capture for the role, and while we also know that Riz Ahmed, Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate are in the film, we don’t know what roles they’re playing.
It’s all kind of exciting to have plenty of mystery surrounding a comic-book film for once, but larger details should emerge soon. The film is set to be released October 5, 2018.
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