For what it's worth, yeah he did
, but maybe you meant to ask this in the Deadpool thread? Or maybe you meant Tom Hardy
?
Sony has 2 Marvel films planned for 2020, one of which is a sequel[1]
. Likely Venom 2 and Morbius.
Yeah, Venom's hitting it out of the park at the box office and is currently sitting at $822m. It's definitely getting a sequel. Critics may have hated it but casual filmgoers loved it.
This is probably because many casual filmgoers don't have the Comic Fan context to be upset about Spider-Man not being in the movie, a complaint so heavily featured in the film's criticism that it even shows up in the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate summary. Spider-Man fans gave this film a pass, but Average Joes didn't know that they're "supposed" to get all bent out of shape about Spider-Man and so they just watched and enjoyed the movie.
Speaking anecdotally, my mom had no idea Venom was even a Spider-Man villain or a villain at all, and she's proclaimed this to be her favorite superhero movie ever filmed.
This is definitely one of those films where you get out of it what you bring into it. If you sat down to the film determined to hate it because Spider-Man isn't in it, then that's what you're going to get.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 26th 2018 at 7:59:03 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.This is probably because many casual filmgoers don't have the Comic Fan context to be upset about Spider-Man not being in the movie
Personally, I hope Venom's box office success puts to bed the argument that popular Marvel villains can't be in movies without their most popular hero 'cause no one would ever want to watch a movie about them.
There's more to Marvel's villains than just being a reflection of Insert Superhero Here and, in fact, some of them are actually more interesting when separated from whatever Rogues Gallery they originated from. The precedent for giving popular villains their own starring roles, in fact, has been around for literal decades.
Let's never forget that characters like the Punisher, Wolverine, and Venom himself have all starred in their own successful franchises despite being originally conceived as someone's supervillain (Spider-Man, the Hulk, and Spider-Man again, respectively). You can certainly make a case that DC villains like the Joker or Lex Luthor are nothing without their hero, but that has never been the case at Marvel.
Spider-Man doesn't own Venom. He doesn't own Sandman or Rhino or Electro. He doesn't even own the Green Goblin. These characters are flexible, able to go fight other heroes and even be the protagonists of their own stories from time to time.
And of all the hills to die on, it was always ridiculous that Venom, a character who has been the title character of countless comics that had nothing to do with Spider-Man and joined multiple superhero teams, was the place where fans dug in their heels and were like, "VENOM CANNOT BE IN A MOVIE WITHOUT SPIDER-MAN, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE!!!"
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 26th 2018 at 10:37:20 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.The Punisher wasn't really conceived as Spider-Man's villain. Yes, his first appearance was as an antagonist in a Spider-Man book, but it was as more of a Let's You and Him Fight thing as even back then he was a killer vigilante and (he thought) Spider-Man was a murderer.
Yes, I'm missing the forest for a single tree, I know. I'm just saying.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.I haven't seen it yet, but I'll admit to feeling a tiny bit smug about it doing well, because there were people even in this very thread that seemed to be actively rooting for this movie to tank before it even came out. And I admit that attitude just rubs me the wrong way. Same for people actively hoping for a particular character to die, just because they don't personally like that character.
That seems like mischaracterizing the thread a tad. People "rooting for it to fail" seemed more on it because A) it looked (and subsequently proved to be) pretty atrocious. B) its success would present a problem for the MCU's use of Spider-Man. I don't recall anybody rooting for it to fail out of irrational hatred.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Comics Venom WAS dependant on Spider-Man though. The powers came directly from Spidey, the motivation of both Brock and the symbiote was a mutual loathing of Spider-Man.
The version in the film works with no Spidey but it's a very different character, almost to the point of In Name Only.
"These 'no-nonsense' solutions of yours just don't hold water in a complex world of jet-powered apes and time travel."I do. People have been against Sony's entire idea of making films out of Spidey's villains without using Spidey himself since it was announced. As the first film to do it, Venom got the brunt of that disdain with people proclaiming that Venom cannot work as a character if he's not a Spider-Man villain.
This despite the fact that he's been the lead protagonist of plenty of comics that had nothing to do with Spider-Man.
And now the audience has spoken and has declared that yeah, filmgoers are totally down for films starring popular Spidey villains.
EDIT: As for being worried about MCU Spidey, if anything, you should be rooting for Sony's projects to succeed. Spidey has a better chance of staying in the MCU if Sony's Spidey-licensed films prove that they have no trouble being profitable without him.
It's the opposite scenario where Spidey-verse films that don't have the wall-crawler wind up tanking and proving that Sony needs Spider-Man for their films that pose a potential threat to MCU Spidey.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 26th 2018 at 4:33:26 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.It didn't look like a Venom movie. Right up to the final trailers, it just seemed like they really didn't want to make Venom. Having now seen the movie, that seems like it was more marketing's problem, since at the very least their effects team really really wanted to make a Venom movie, but given what we'd seen and been told, it's not really surprising people didn't want what they'd been told and shown they'd be getting, ie. a Venom movie without Spider-Man or, apparently, Venom.
And not that this origin story isn't serviceable, other than that big time gap with Riot that makes no sense but which I think is just an editing/continuity problem rather than a story one, but cutting out the possibility of Peter Parker getting the symbiote (and John Jameson — Man-Wolf!) does make it feel like something of a wasted opportunity (even if it isn't). Not that they were likely to do that anyway, not that they couldn't still do it if they wanted, but it just seems like for the story they ended up telling, they'd have been better off just doing a flashback/time skip that left a large swath of the symbiotes' (all of their) previous activities unaccounted for.
Edited by Unsung on Nov 26th 2018 at 11:05:43 AM
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I think you latched on that thesis about people's problems with Venom being the lack of spider-man to the point you're overlooking the legitimate problems people had with the movie before its release. Besides what Unsung said about a horrible marketing and a seemingly mischaracterized Venom, there's also the fact Venom's success a solo character is debatable: Lethal Protector isn't exactly a beloved classic of comic book writing history. Most of his solo work tends to be considered mediocre to bad. Probably the most beloved solo Venom is Agent Venom, which is explicitly not the one we're dealing with here.
Also: I'm pretty sure you got the situation exactly backwards. Sony only allowed the MCU to play with their property because they were failing miserably at doing anything with said property. It was a gamble caused by desperation and sheer incompetence. Now that their own Spider projects are taking off, they have no real incentive to keep up the deal with MCU rather than just taking Spidey now that their own Spidey universe is estabilizing.
Spidey was always Sony's greatest bet in the age of the MCU and they wanted to use him to launch a cinematic universe around him. Once that crashed and burned they loaned Spidey to the MCU so the MCU could do the heavy lifting of their own cinematic universe. Now their own cinematic universe is starting to take off, they're pretty soon gonna be asking for Spidey back.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Best they learn to share. Get their own Spider-Man, do their own thing. Lean into the Spider-Verse, expand on that idea. Marvel has Tom Holland, Sony has Tom Hardy, and then they can bring Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen into live-action as well as hopefully doing more with the animated multiverse. They call it synergy, and I would honestly kind of love it that's the direction they took it in.
I'd find that pretty awesome, but I rather doubt Sony would be that benevolent. It's honestly much more likely they get their toys and go home now that they have little incentive to play nice.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Spidey was always Sony's greatest bet in the age of the MCU and they wanted to use him to launch a cinematic universe around him. Once that crashed and burned they loaned Spidey to the MCU so the MCU could do the heavy lifting of their own cinematic universe. Now their own cinematic universe is starting to take off, they're pretty soon gonna be asking for Spidey back.
The incentive is that Spider-Man isn't in the Venom movie. It takes a pretty tortured logic chain to decide that Venom's success is proof that Sony needs to pull Spider-Man out of the MCU in order to sell their movies.
Venom is an experiment to see if they can make these movies without Spider-Man and it made back 8x its budget. I don't quite see how that spells doom for MCU Spidey.
If anything, the fact that Spider-Man wasn't in the movie is probably a contributing factor in how well it did. Ask filmgoers what they want out of superhero movies and I bet you that "Reboot Spider-Man again!" isn't going to be very high on their wish list. One of Venom's strengths as a film is that it's not Spider-Man 7. In fact, if you don't know much about comics, you could easily mistake it for being a new adapted franchise.
Sony just tested the waters for reinterpreting Spider-Man's Rogues Gallery as a bunch of unique and interesting properties rather than various villains for one property, and it went really well. I doubt their first response to that will be to immediately scrap all their plans for the sake of more movies about Peter Parker.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 26th 2018 at 8:23:23 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.

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Why would he, and why ask in this thread that's entirely unrelated to Ryan and barely related to Stan?
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