Tom Hardy uses Instagram post to confirm the 'Venom' suit will appear in new film

Tom Hardy has addressed rumours that the upcoming Venom movie barely features Venom in costume, calling them “asinine”.

A now-deleted post on a movie rumours blog had put forward the idea that the Venom costume only appears in the closing moments of the film, and for the brunt of the runtime it only manifests itself on Hardy’s arms and torso. 

You can see why the filmmakers (including Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer) would be caught in something of a quandary. Venom is a great character, but Tom Hardy is a movie star. If he spent the whole movie looking like this:

then some people would be disappointed. Like, a reasonable part of Tom Hardy’s USP is that he’s really, really good-looking (the other part is that he does a different something wacky with his voice in every film, and it’s fun to speculate on whether it’ll be one of those ones where you can’t really understand  what he’s saying). 

Iron Man got to have it both ways, where we still saw Robert Downey Jr’s handsome marquee face inside the suit, but that approach wouldn’t work with the alien symbiote costume Eddie Brock wears. Venom is like a full-on monster rather than a helmet.

“We do not see the actual Venom suit until the very end of the movie,” stated the blog post, “when the symbiote forms it around Brock to fight the big bad government villain who is also using a symbiote from space.” The rumour - which has since been deleted, deeply upset fans of the character, leading to Hardy eventually addressing it on his Instagram.

“Just saying, Venom suit. Myths, usually asinine, circulate about things - usually by those who have failed to gather credible intel,” he wrote (commas ours). 

It would be easy enough to quash these rumours, of course, by releasing some footage, any footage, showing him in full-on Venom mode. But, again, that’s a quandary for the filmmakers - does nobody value the element of surprise any more? Sure, they could reveal all now and stop fans moaning, but then nobody gasps in the cinema when they finally get to see their favourite character on the big screen, because they already saw him on YouTube so know what he looks like. It’s difficult. 

The trailer is, of course, Venomless:

There are three possibilities, really:

• The rumour quoted above is correct, and we see very little of Venom in the film. This would obviously be a shame, as there are loads of films with Tom Hardy’s mantasticness in, but Venom’s only in this and Spider-Man 3.
• Venom is in it loads, but the filmmakers don’t want to spoil it. This would be great.
• Venom is in it loads, but they’ve not finished the effects yet or they’re redoing it because it came out looking a bit weird. This seems like the most likely scenario, if you’re really optimistic anyway.

There are plenty of other things we don’t know about the film yet (Who’s Woody Harrelson playing? Will any characters from Spider-Man: Homecoming show up? Will it explicitly set up spin-offs? Is Carnage definitely in it?),  but isn’t that, maybe, okay? Can’t we go and see a film without knowing everything about it? Wouldn’t it be kind of fun to go and see a film because the trailer had a handsome guy riding a motorbike, and then halfway through, go “Hang on, an alien costume is bonding with him to form a monstrous antiheroic symbiote! Holy shit!”?

We’ll all find out when Venom is released on October 5th.