Sony Pictures Entertainment
- Sony Pictures released the first trailer for its Spider-Man spin-off, "Venom," on Thursday.
- The footage puts the "tease" in "teaser trailer" and fails to even briefly show Tom Hardy as the title character.
- As of now, "Venom" is not connected to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is instead a contained story that most likely won't feature Tom Holland as Spider-Man.
Sony Pictures has finally released footage of one of the most perplexing comic-book movies in recent memory: "Venom," a solo movie directed by Ruben Fleischer ("Zombieland") focused on Spider-Man's arch-nemesis. It opens October 5.
The first teaser dropped Thursday morning, and definitely emphasizes "teaser." While there's plenty of Tom Hardy, there's no footage of him as the title character. The rest of the impressive cast, including Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed, are briefly shown.
From what can be gathered from the limited amount of footage, Hardy's troubled Eddie Brock character is transformed into Venom after an alien spaceship crashes to Earth.
If you're wondering if this is connected to any other Marvel films, you're not alone.
In 2015, Sony Pictures struck a collaborative deal with Marvel Studios over the film rights to Spider-Man. In the deal, neither studio would profit from each other's films featuring the character, and Marvel would be able to use its own version of Spider-Man while Sony continues to finance, distribute, and have creative control over its films.
Since then, Sony has set out to prove it can make its own Spider-Man movie once again. Only this time, it doesn't feature the wall-crawler.
Instead, Tom Hardy stars as one of the character's most popular villains, Eddie Brock, aka Venom. It's been over a decade since we last saw the character on the big screen in 2007's "Spider-Man 3," which concluded director Sam Raimi's trilogy. The film was a disappointment, and has a 63% Rotten Tomatoes score compared to "Spider-Man" and "Spider-Man 2," at 89% and 93% respectively.
Back then, Brock was portrayed by Topher Grace as a competing photographer to Spider-Man's alter ego, Peter Parker.
By recruiting Tom Hardy for the role, and based on this first trailer, Sony seems to be sending the message that this movie will have a very different tone than "Spider-Man 3."
The question remains whether Spider-Man will actually make a small appearance. It's been rumored that Tom Holland's Marvel Studios version of the web-slinger may drop by, but nothing has been confirmed.
In the mean time, watch the first trailer below: