One of Spider-Man’s most famous enemies, Venom, is getting his own movie, and Sony has enlisted Tom Hardy for the starring role as Eddie Brock. In a tweet posted Friday afternoon, Sony Pictures confirmed the Mad Max: Fury Road lead will play the iconic and violent supervillain. Ruben Fleischer, best known as the director of Zombieland, is in negotiations to helm the project.
Venom is one of Sony’s Spider-Man spin-offs following the studio’s limited partnership with Disney-backed Marvel Studios for Spider-Man: Homecoming. Unless something crazy happens, though, it’s not going to share continuity with the MCU. Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) wrote the script, which will follow the original Venom host, Eddie Brock. In the comics, Brock was a Daily Bugle journalist and rival to Peter Parker, but he fell prey to Venom after coming in contact with an alien parasite brought to Earth by, who else, Spider-Man.
Tom Hardy, who played Batman’s nemesis Bane in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, is an imposing choice to play the villain. Sony Pictures posted a picture of the actor wearing a Venom shirt on Friday that read: “Tom Hardy is Eddie Brock in #Venom, the upcoming film from Sony’s Marvel Universe releasing October 5, 2018 – production starts this fall.”
The film is an interesting choice for Tom Hardy, whose filmography is wonderfully all over the place. He’s acted in big popcorn movies like The Dark Knight Rises and Fury Road, slummed it in the action rom-com This Means War, and garnered critical acclaim from gritty crime dramas like Bronson, Locke, and The Drop. In 2015, Hardy received an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant.
See the tweet from Sony below.
Venom will be released on October 5, 2018. It is not, importantly, a sequel to the sci-fi horror film Life with Ryan Reynolds.
