By now you’ve all heard the news that Sony will be releasing a solo Venom film on 5 October 2018, which will be written by Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner. Amid a ton of speculation, it’s now been confirmed that the film will not be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This was stated by Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts in an interview with Fandango. He was quoted as saying the following:
“[‘Venom’ is] not connected to the Marvel world, so that’s really intriguing… what that will be.” The director said, cryptically. “I don’t know anything about it. It’s not connected, so there’s not that overlap. I’m only focused on my movie right now.”
Sony now have the rights to set their Spider-Man-related films within the MCU on the condition that Disney can also feature the Wall-Crawler as a supporting character in their own films (Tom Holland will next reprise the role in Avengers: Infinity War). Many were hoping that Venom would be the first R-rated MCU film, but at least we have the MCU-set Netflix shows, which feature a ton of hardcore violence and gore and even a few F-bombs.
Film production tracking site My Entertainment World have listed Venom’s genres as follows: Action/Horror/Sci-Fi, and while many sites are convinced that this means it will be a horror film in addition to being R-rated, we’ll remain cautiously optimistic until further details come to light.
Sony have been trying to get a Venom solo film off the ground since the Klyntar Symbiote merged with Eddie Brock in the the cinematic trainwreck that was Spider-Man 3 back in 2007. The fact that they choose not to make the film part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe raises the question of whether Disney will retaliate in any way. What do I mean by that? Well, the film rights to the X-Men and Fantastic Four belong to 20th Century Fox, and seeing as Disney make no profits from films featuring said characters, the House of Mouse has gone out of their way to slowly erase them from the Marvel canon.
This includes cancelling the long running Fantastic Four comic just days after Fox announced that they were making a new Fantastic Four movie, editing out X-Men and Fantastic Four characters from T-shirts and posters depicting famous Marvel covers, explicitly telling artists not to include X-Men or Fantastic Four characters on Marvel’s 50th Anniversary trading cards, ordering the collectible company XM Studios to stop making Fantastic Four and X-Men products, and releasing the Avengers vs. X-Men comic miniseries, which not only demonized the X-Men and made them seem like villains, but also showed made them look weak and incompetent after the Avengers easily defeat them.
I could give a ton more examples (there have even been rumblings that Disney want to remove mutants from the Marvel Comics universe entirely), but let’s just hope that Sony and Disney have come to an understanding so that a similar situation doesn’t transpire with Venom. Seeing as there are rumblings that Sony may want to sell off their film division entirely due to decreasing profits, the electronics giant certainly wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize the performance of any of their future films. And we’ve seen how aggressively Disney react against non-MCU Marvel films, but hopefully the fact that both companies are sharing Spider-Man will mean that they’ll go easy on Venom.
Co-created by Todd McFarlane, Venom first appeared as an evil counterpart to Spider-Man in 1988 before becoming more of an anti-hero, with Carnage taking his place as the big bad Symbiote. We don’t know much about the plot of the film, but I for one am hoping that they go the Venom: Space Knight route. That comic series was basically Guardians of the Galaxy with him taking center stage. Now there’s a film I would give anything to see.
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