The Venom movie's official Rotten Tomatoes score has been revealed. It's no secret that it has been a long and arduous journey getting a live-action Venom film on the big screen. Starting out in the late 1990s, New Line Cinema first tried their hand at adapting the Lethal Protector, but it didn't work out. And then it wasn't until 2007 that Sony Pictures managed to incorporate Venom into Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3, though it wasn't necessarily the best idea, to begin with.

Since then, the studio has been trying to produce live-action movies for both Venom and the supervillain team Sinister Six. After spending several years seemingly stuck in development hell, Venom finally moved into production last October, with Zombieland and Gangster Squad director Ruben Fleischer at the helm - directing from a script by Jeff Pinkner & Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel - and Tom Hardy in the title role as Eddie Brock, who comes into contact with the alien symbiote and become Venom.

Related: Is Venom In The MCU? Marvel/Spider-Man Movie Rights & Shared Universes Explained

A day after the world premiere in Los Angeles, CA, the first batch of Venom reviews started to crop up online - and they were quite... interesting. While the movie wasn't being outright praised, some critics did complement the film on its first half but also said that the overall film is a nonsensical mess, especially in the third act. And now, Rotten Tomatoes has unveiled their aggregated score: (as of the time of this writing) based on 41 reviews, Venom currently has a score of 32%. The critical consensus reads: "Venom's first standalone movie turns out to be like the comics character in all the wrong ways - chaotic, noisy, and in desperate need of a stronger attachment to Spider-Man."

Eddie Brock peers out from within the Venom symbiote in Venom.

It's certainly not the lowest score a comic book movie has ever gotten, let alone the lowest in recent years, but it's definitely not a good score either. Even though some reviews are mixed and offer a more nuanced take on the movie than it simply being "bad", the aggregated score from Rotten Tomatoes paints the production as an irrefutable misfire. It remains to be seen what the audience score will be, but this could very well become the latest movie in a string of blockbuster films that divide critics and general audiences - but that's something that viewers will just have to wait and see about.

Regardless, a low Rotten Tomatoes score like this doesn't bode well for Sony's movie, not to mention for their burgeoning Spider-Man spinoff franchise. At the moment, the studio has several ideas kicking around, with Jared Leto's Morbius being the next Marvel movie to enter production. But if the movie doesn't perform well at the box office, then it's unlikely fans will get a sequel, let alone see Sony's new franchise take off. In the end, though, audiences will ultimately decide Venom's (commercial) success.

More: Venom Review: Tom Hardy's Superhero Movie is a Weirdly Fun Monster

Source: Rotten Tomatoes

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