Creator Doesn’t Think Venom Can Carry A Movie

As part of the Spider-Man 4/5 story that just broke, Deadline Hollywood also reported that Sony is moving forward with a movie about Venom, one of the villains in Spider-Man 3. Without giving specifics, the word is that a pair of screenwriters have been hired to start work on the script.

The interesting thing is that Todd MacFarlane, one of the creators of the character, doesn’t think Venom can work very well as the “hero” of a movie.

In early August Todd MacFarlane spoke to Newsarama.com about the possibility of a Venom spin-off movie. He realizes that the character can’t be too scary due to the PG/PG-13 target for superhero movies, but that even within those parameters he should be made creepier than he was in Spider-Man 3:

“I think you could add a little bit of a creep factor. I mean, it never bugged me to watch Frankenstein as a kid, so you could have a little bit of it, as long as you have a good story backing it up.”

One interesting item that surfaced was the fact that he didn’t design the character to be human in any way. He designed Venom to be a monster/creature, not a suit worn by a person.

MacFarlane said that the reason some villains are so cool is because they’re so “bad” and trying to make them an “anti-hero” ruins the essence of the character:

“The reason they’re so cool as a bad guy is because they’re bad. And as soon as you try to give too much humanity to them, then you go, no! Now they’re not as good as a bad guy because you’re trying to redeem them.”

I’ve questioned in the past how the heck you take a character like Venom and make him the star of his own movie. As MacFarlane says, to work in a movie setting, by the end of the film there has to be some level of goodness in Venom, and that detracts from who he is.

How do you think Venom could work as the star of his own film?

Source: Newsarama and Deadline Hollywood Daily