The original Venom film, released in 2018, was something of a mixed bag. Part of SONY‘s Marvel Studios-Adjacent titles it occupied the space that couldn’t quite compare to its MCU cousins on character-development and CGI-budget, but despite withering reviews worked fairly well as a guilty-pleasure. Based on the famous character from the Spider-man comics, the creature of the title is actually a symbiotic almost second-skin organism that takes control of its host. In the comics, it was an extraterrestrial alien that ‘masqueraded’ as a new Spider-man costume until Peter Parker worked out it was actually sentient and independently dangerous and in the decades since Marvel have turned Venom into something of an anti-hero rather than outright villain.
The first film, featuring Tom Hardy as journalist Eddie Brock and reluctant host of the symbiote, is seen as part of the sub-universe of Spider-man-related outings, though it kept any real Spider-man connection at arm’s length, leaving Brock and Venom in a sometimes mutually-beneficial arrangement in which the organism doesn’t kill innocents but protects them (though what it does to those it perceives a guilty is… icky). The film’s decent box-office but bad reviews far from guaranteed any continuation (especially with SONY and Marvel coming to a different deal on character usage), but over three years on a sequel is about to hit screens.
Venom: Let there be Carnage was originally due in cinemas at the end of last year, but the COVID situation caused understandable delays. It was then moved to June 2021 and has now settled in for 24th September. A new trailer has just been released given a taster of what we can expect. Directed by Andy Serkis (no stranger to motion-capture tech himself), Hardy will reprise the role of Brock and Michelle Williams will also return as his love interest Anne Weying. Woody Harrelson, a minor but foreshadowed player in the original, essays Cletus Kasady / Carnage and Oscar-nominee Naomie Harris takes the role of Shriek – both of them new versions of the symbiote who have grievances with their ‘parent’…
