VENOM.

A SONY PROJECT WITHOUT SPIDER-MAN

HOW SONY GOT VENOM TO THE SCREEN

Sony revived the project in March 2016 with Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach producing. Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner were set to write in March 2017, and Ruben Fleischer and Tom Hardy were added in May 2017, with Kelly Marcel writing the latest draft. Spider-Man could not appear because of Sony’s deal to loan the character to Marvel Studios.

Fleischer explained what drew him to it:

“we had the opportunity to launch a whole new world, a whole new character.”

Ruben Fleischer, 3 October 2018

A DARKER TONE AND A PG-13 RATING

WHY THE FILM IS PG-13 AND WHAT IT BORROWS FROM

Sony first aimed for an R rating on a smaller budget, but the film was rated PG-13. Fleischer said in June 2018 that the tone was “darker and more menacing,” and that his influences included John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and An American Werewolf in London. He later described a tone that mixes horror, comedy, thriller and action, and credited Hardy with creating “so much interplay between Eddie and Venom.”

ATLANTA, SAN FRANCISCO AND SLIME MOULD

HOW THE SYMBIOTE WAS MADE

Filming began on 23 October 2017 in Atlanta and New York City, with San Francisco shooting from 16 to 26 January 2018. DNEG handled about 1,100 effects shots under supervisor Paul Franklin, and the symbiote’s design drew on slime moulds, jellyfish and time-lapse footage of amoebas. Tencent covered about a third of production costs, and Ludwig Göransson composed the score.

The film cost $100 million before marketing.

AN OCTOBER OPENING RECORD

HOW THE FILM OPENED

The film premiered on 1 October 2018 in Los Angeles and opened in 4,250 US and Canadian theatres on 5 October. It took $80,255,756 on its opening weekend and went on to earn about $856.1 million worldwide. The opening beat the $55.8 million October opening of Gravity, and it was the widest October release ever.

There is a mid-credits scene with Woody Harrelson as Cletus Kasady and a post-credits clip from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

THE REWATCH

A 31% CRITICS SCORE AND AN 80% AUDIENCE SCORE

Rotten Tomatoes lists a 31% critics’ score from 365 reviews but an 80% audience score, and its consensus calls the film “chaotic, noisy, and in desperate need of a stronger attachment to Spider-Man.” Metacritic gives it 35 from 46 critics, and CinemaScore audiences gave it a B+.

In the Marvel Marathon it is classed as a Spider-Verse film. It sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide between Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel, and in the Spider-Man movies in order guide between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. It is not in the MCU guides.