Venom's co-creator Todd McFarlane cites the majority of critics' old age as the main reason why most of them didn't enjoy the movie. Introducing Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, the Ruben Fleischer-directed flick exceeded expectations at the box office, becoming the 10th highest-grossing movie of 2018 in the U.S. and fifth worldwide despite the fact that it was a critical bomb.
The film's financial success means a whole lot for Sony's plans to build their own interconnected universe starring Spider-Man tie-in characters which include Jared Leto's Morbius the Living Vampire and Silver Sable and Black Cat films. It also supposedly hinders the possible re-acquisition of Spider-Man rights by Marvel. According to McFarlane, however, there's a reason why critics didn't dig Venom and it has something to do with professional film reviewers' ages.
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Speaking with Yahoo! McFarlane discussed the controversial Venom, which was generally liked by the audience but ripped apart by most professional critics as backed up by data on Rotten Tomatoes. According to him, the discord between the critics' and viewers' rating can be chalked up to the majority of the latter's older age bracket which made it difficult for them to appreciate the project as a well-rounded, entertaining film overall.
“It was a big roller-coaster ride. Visually, everything was coming at you. I think at times … the critics get it wrong in that they forget their age. They come in, and they’re 42 years old, and they come in with their attitude and they’re going, ‘Stop it.’ What if you were 16 and you were watching this movie? You would love it.”
McFarlane continued to double down on Venom's good points, including the fact that it was a true-to-comic movie adaptation - something that's impressive considering how tough translating the character on the big screen is - especially without any narrative tie-in to Spider-Man. “This thing delivered everything it was supposed to. It was gnarly, it was nasty, it has a big cool Venom, which was what I was looking for. [That] was my bias — I just wanted to see the visualness of Venom that I had created 30 years prior,” he said.
It's true that a majority of critics didn't like Venom, but there are a few who actually dug it, particularly the dynamic between Eddie and Venom. There were some odd creative choices in the film that were expected to be divisive, but at the end of the day and as McFarlane pointed out, it fits the branding of the character - something that is ultimately the most important thing to nail in film adaptations. Lastly, despite people's varying opinions of the movie, it appears like a majority of the public is game, if not even looking forward to a sequel which was already set-up at the end of the film with the introduction of Cletus Kasady aka Carnage played by Woody Harrelson. Suffice to say, the future looks a bright for the budding Song franchise despite critics' negative perception of its launching project.