Sony has officially delayed Venom 2's release date by eight months. While it was far from a critical darling, the first Venom was a huge box office success (grossing $856 million on an estimated $100 million budget) and lay the groundwork for Sony to continue develop solo films centered around villains and antiheroes from the Spider-Man comic books. Suffice it to say, Venom 2 has since received a green-light, with Tom Hardy once again starring as Eddie Brock and Andy Serkis taking over as director from Ruben Fleischer.
Building on the tease in the original Venom's post-credits scenes, the sequel will pit Eddie and his symbiote counterpart against Woody Harrelson as the serial killer Cletus Kasady and his own alien "buddy", Carnage. As with every other developing movie and TV show, Venom 2 was forced to shut down production last month over health and safety concerns in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Curiously, though, Sony didn't move the sequel from its previous spot in October when it overhauled its 2020 release slate a few weeks back.
Today, the studio changed that and officially moved Venom 2 back eight months from its original October 2, 2020 release date to June 25, 2021 instead. It has also given the sequel a proper title in the form of Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
Thanks to its release date change, Venom 2 will now hit theaters after Sony's Morbius (which was delayed from July 2020 to March 2021 earlier this month), as was originally the studio's plan. Although it's unclear if the two Spider-Man antihero movies will connect to one another in any significant way, the trailers for Morbius have indicated Sony is using the film to further build up to the Sinister Six crossover they've been wanting to make for years (going back to before Spider-Man joined the MCU). As such, it might be important for Jared Leto's vampiric superhero to make his way to the big screen before Hardy gets his symbiote on again, from an overarching storytelling perspective.
Their decision to shift Serkis' sequel to a prime summertime spot is further testament to Sony's faith in both the strength of the Venom brand and the film's ability to turn a healthy profit, even during one of the more traditionally competitive frames of the annual box office. At the moment, Venom 2 is scheduled to open two weeks after Jurassic World: Dominion, which will be targeting most of the same demographics. However, with production on the third Jurassic World shut-down for the time being because of the coronavirus, odds are the dino-sequel will eventually be pushed back to a later spot in 2021 (if not all the way back to 2022), clearing the way for Eddie and Venom to bite the heads off their competitors... y'know, figuratively speaking.
Source: Sony
