No one was more disappointed with Venom in Spider-Man 3 than I was. The afterthought cramming of the character into a story that already had two villians not only reduced one encounter to a three movie anticlimax, but tried to force the Venom issue too soon.
So almost in a damage control move, Sony has confirmed it will move forward with a stand alone Venom film.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much to say about the movie this early in the game. Wernick says that the pair is basically sworn to secrecy about the project, but they did confirm that they were big fans of the character and planned to treat him with the respect he deserves. “We read [Venom] growing up, but we were not experts,” admits Reese. “We certainly know the mythology of Venom, but went back and learned more when it became clear that we could actually get this job.”
The way this should have been handled would have been to have Spiderman 3 revolve around Peter Parker’s internal struggle with the agressively dark tendencies brought on by the symbiot black costume while the three episode story arc of the Goblin steamed to a head with Osborne finally dealing with the death of his father.
It would end with Parker triumphing over the influence of the symbiot costume, and it slithering away looking for a new host leading into a Venom story. There’s your followup Spiderman film the fans wanted to see. But instead we get an effort to recover the fan following of the character in a spinoff film.
Better late than never.
But if Venom is the star, then we know it won’t be against Spider-man (cause then it would be Spiderman 4), so a new adversary will have to come forward. And that likely means a redemption story for Venom (or at least his host). A little bit of a parallel to the Hulk, a menace with his own power overcoming his capacity for destruction.
The only way to make the fans happy with this one might be Carnage.
