Venom will be the most violent Marvel movie yet: “There are no heroes”

The upcoming Venom movie sounds like it’s going to be extraordinarily violent, if comments made by the cast and crew at Comic-Con are anything to go by. The antihero’s big-screen outing is coming in October, and director Ruben Fleischer and star Tom Hardy have promised big, gross things.

“We want to do justice to the true nature of Venom, which is a brain eating alien that occupies people and runs wild in the world,” Fleischer told Variety. “We’re pushing the envelope.”

He told the San Diego crowd that “There are no heroes here” and that Hardy’s incarnation of Eddie Brock was a “much grittier, grounded, complicated character” than people were used to seeing in superhero films. He also said they were hoping to make more films about Brock/Venom after this one, and include all the other characters from the comics. 

Tom Hardy said part of his thinking in taking on the part (in addition to the main one, his love of the character) was that so many of his previous films have been too intense for his son - things like The Revenant aren’t exactly child-friendly. In a bid to make a film he could watch with his son, “I did something where I bite people’s heads off” he said. His son is ten.

“I’m a dad,” he said. “And one of this things you come across as a father is a massive influx of stories brought to you, after Fireman Sams, by Spider-Mans and Venoms and Captain Americas. My son came to me with a specific character that he fell in love with, and I started to take a look myself. And then, as if by magic, a script appeared. Having done The Dark Knight [Rises] with Chris [Nolan], I’d done my superhero bit, but when I was presented with the opportunity to play Venom, and that correlated with my son’s love of Venom, and how cool he was, I got really really excited and decided I really wanted to do it”. 

The footage from Venom that they showed at the convention, according to Variety, featured a scene where Venom threatens to crush a man until he “looks like a legless, faceless turd” and left them in no doubt that it would get an R rating (either a 15 or 18 here depending on certain criteria) due to Brock’s habits of (a) ripping people into several pieces and (b) eating them. GOOD.

Venom is out on October 5th.