Venom 2 Officially Taps Andy Serkis as Director

A week ago it was reported that Andy Serkis was leading the shortlist of directors that Sony was looking at for Venom 2 – but now it’s been made official. Reports are dropping that Serkis has officially closed his deal to direct Venom 2, taking over for Venom director Ruben Fleischer.

THR confirmed Sony’s choice of Serkis as director – but really, fans were all but ready to celebrate late last week, when Venom star Tom Hardy dropped this not-so-cryptic tease that Serkis was indeed going to be directing the Venom sequel:

Obviously Serkis is one of the most talented and famous pioneers of the modern motion-capture process for creating fantastical creature characters in films. After his game-changing turn as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films, Serkis cemented his potential as a leading man by depicting the epic evolution of the ape Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy. While he didn’t direct that series, Serkis was heavily credited for helping to craft the finer points of Caesar’s evolution from simple primate to the war-scarred leader of an entire race of intelligent apes he helped create; moreover, Serkis helped to coach the ensemble of other mo-cap actors needed to create Caesar’s army of Apes in all three films.

That’s all to say: Andy Serkis been ready for a challenge like Venom for quite some time. And given where the original film left the sequel storyline, it could really take a master of creating mo-cap creatures to really sell the horror and gravitas of Venom 2!

As previously stated: The post-credits scene of Venom introduced Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady, the infamous serial killer who goes on in the comics to become the symbiote-wearing killer known as Carnage. The Venom post-credits scene all but screamed Carnage’s arrival in Venom 2, which could adapt a Marvel Comics crossover storyline like “Maximum Carnage”, which saw Venom having to team with Spider-Man and other heroes to stop Carnage and his gang of monstrous killers from massacring their way across Manhattan.

With Cletus Kasady on the board, and suggestion that we could see Tom Hardy’s Venom and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man crossover sooner before later, Venom 2 has all the potential of being one of the biggest Marvel movies outside of the main Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. Just more reason that fans want someone like Serkis, who is capable of telling a cohesive and sensible creature-horror superhero film. The fact that he’s already worked with Harrelson (who played Caesar’s nemesis in War for the Planet of the Apes) is just icing on the cake.

Venom 2 is slated for release on October 2, 2020.