Sony had already surprised everyone once with the simple fact they're moving a Venom standalone film into production with a Fall 2018 release date, but now they've one-upped themselves by casting Tom Hardy. Yes, Tom Hardy, man of a million, equally incomprehensible voices and all round class act will be playing Eddie Brock in Rueben Fleischer's film based on the corrupted Spider-Man villain.
An announcement was obviously going to happen soon if Sony were actually going to follow through on their promise of an 18-month production, but nobody expected Hardy to be headlining. There'd been no rumors or even speculation on this. Now the initial shock has subsided, though, there's really only one conclusion: they couldn't have snatched up a better star.
Specifically for this project, Hardy has experience in the blockbuster and superhero arena. Obviously, he played villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises and was for a time attached to Suicide Squad before scheduling conflicts with The Revenant forced him to drop out, and through his repeated collaboration with Christopher Nolan (besides Rises he's been in Inception and the upcoming Dunkirk) has manage to notch up several tentpole releases despite a more artistic angling. This is rather rudimentary, but beyond evident acting prowess and an understanding of how to play to fans, it means he'll be well-equipped to deal with what is going to be a breakneck production.
Of course, there is also the acting prowess, and here's where the choice becomes genius. Hardy's skillset is perfect for the resentful, trapped Eddie Brock (in the comics he's shown up by Spider-Man before allowing the Venom symbiote to use that rage to turn him into a supervillain). Yes, in the day-to-day he's a down-to-Earth actor who's able to present real class (see Inception, Legend, his CBeebies' Bedtime Stories), but when you give him a role with meat he shows immense, varied hidden depths; Locke, the other side of his dual role in Legend and The Revenant. The popular joke is that it's all funny voices and anger, but each one has a dual vulnerability within them (as well as in contrast to his more conventional turns).
And then there's Bronson. Made before he was a household name, Nicholas Winding-Refn's unhinged biopic on Britain's most violent convict Charles Bronson (real name Michael Gordon Peterson) gave Hardy a chance to show how unsettling and demented he could go. When he was cast in The Dark Knight Rises, Bane's physique was treated like the obvious extension of the role, but in light of the Venom news it feels a bit misguided; while the masked revolutionary definitely was a tough fighter and shared similar gypsy fighting origins to Bronson, not much in terms of acting technique was actually used. The intense unpredictability that made Bronson so utterly terrifying and captivating has yet to be matched in Hardy's subsequent career, but is ripe to be channeled into Brock (and of course the actor's ability to bulk up will give us a hulking Venom straight from the page).
He's also a fan, something the official Sony announcement, featuring Hardy wearing a Venom t-shirt, really hammer home. Such assurances are commonplace in the modern blockbuster landscape where studios are keen to telegraph to fans that they've hired the right person for their beloved property, but with Hardy the choice feels genuine. He's not one to sign onto a project lightly, which further suggests that Sony will get Venom right this time.
As Spider-Man fans painfully know, this won't be the first time the symbiote has appeared on the big screen. He was the primary antagonist of Spider-Man 3 and the core of many of the disappointing film's problems; from dancing emo Peter Parker to a complete lack of genuine peril, it's fair to say Sony has managed to ruin Venom most out of Spidey's rogues (with perhaps the exception of Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2). And that's the other side of Hardy's casting; it's not just a case of the actor fitting the part, but of the actor essentially making the part remotely interesting.
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What Tom Hardy's Casting Tells Us About Venom
Up until this casting, Venom was a bizarre prospect. He was first shoehorned into Spider-Man 3 following studio pressure and a solo project had been mooted as part of The Amazing Spider-Man shared universe that Sony were trying to get off the ground until the disappointing sequel-cum-establisher underperformed (noticing a trend here), leading to the Marvel agreement - a joint-custody deal that allowed the character and his ephemera to join the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This made Venom, Sinister Six and the Aunt May prequel look dead and buried. However, it turns out they were only resting, with Sony hoping to cash in on the plaudits being in the MCU brought to the Spidey brand and start their own mega-franchise.
The immediate problem with this is that they're essentially embarking on a Spider-Man franchise without Spider-Man; Venom is a film featuring one of the associated characters yet isn't related to Tom Holland's iteration. This sort of thing has been done before - see Steel, who wasn't long off being a Superman replacement when Shaq took up the hammer - but feels incredibly suspect, especially when you consider the rumors swirling the studio's long-term plan; there's suggestions that Sony are either planning to renege the Spidey deal after Homecoming 2 once his image is restored or that this is all just a move on Sony's part to improve their dismal financials and prompt a sale of Columbia Pictures.
Hardy's casting does nothing to address those rumors, but what it does is make a creative argument for the project. There's no actor working today whose mere presence is a quality guarantee (Daniel Day Lewis has Nine, Leonardo DiCaprio has J. Edgar), although with Hardy there is an overarching sense of purpose; even if not all of his movies are winners, or his performances great, you can usually see an underlying creative drive that would make him take the role. In fact, the last time he was in a film obviously for the money was This Means War all the way back in 2o12, and that entered production in 2010, long before Hardy was a name who could command his projects. Also on the choice note, he's typically found at his self-professed home studio Warner Bros., and while we're no longer in the Golden Age contract quagmire there must be something to the project to make him go over to Sony.
Further, Hardy's a man who can actually carry a film. He's a bonafide leading man used to playing front-and-center on the world stage and habitually gets immersed in a project; the only recent case where he played a supporting fiddle is The Revenant. This calms those worries about whether Venom can survive without Spider-Man; there'll likely be some fudging on a script level, sure, but on a movie-wide scale Hardy has it in him to make us care without constantly anticipating a Peter Parker cameo.
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With one announcement the Venom spinoff-not-spinoff has gone from being one of 2018's most eye-rolling prospects to one of its most curious. It's not in the MCU, it's not going to feature Spider-Man, and it's being produced by the people who ruined the character before. But they got Tom freaking Hardy, and that counts for a lot.
