Tom Hardy Reveals Who Wins Between Venom And Bane

With the press tour for Sony’s Venom beginning to ramp up, ComicBook.com sat down with two of the movie’s biggest stars — Tom Hardy and Riz Ahmed — to talk about the upcoming flick featuring the fan-favorite anti-hero.

Right out of the gate, ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis asked Hardy — who plays the movie’s titular character and it’s human alter-ego Eddie Brock — who’d when in a public speaking contest between Bane and Venom.

Without hesitation, Hardy responded with the former.

“Bane. He’s a demagogue,” Hardy quickly said.

Ahmed — who’ll play Carlton Drake/Riot — quickly piped up, mentioned that Venom reminded him of a god, not a political leader.

“Demagogue?” joke Ahmed. “I’d say he’s more like a demigod.”

When Venom swings into theaters in a few weeks, it will come with a PG-13 rating. According to Venom producer Avi Arad, an R rating was never seriously in consideration for the flick.

“To me, R is not a consideration,” Arad said. “Can you get away with not R so that other people can see? So that younger people can see? I made an animated show. There was a lot of Venom in there. It was in ’94. There’s no reason to put in violence. To define what Venom is as violence. He’s not. He’s the lethal protector, which is a very different thing. We want to be really true to the comics.”

“Today, in CGI and stuff, we can make Venom bite your head. But we don’t have to show the head going side to side like, ‘that actually tastes good.’ It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that you finally understood, is that a bad guy? Yeah.”

Venom director and Zombieland alum Ruben Fleischer echoed the sentiment.

“We only ever talked about this movie as being PG13,” Fleischer said. “What I’ve said in the past is that we wanted to push the violence to the hilt. The Dark Knight was always a huge reference point for me, personally, just as far as how far you could take a PG-13 because that movie they put a pen through a guy’s forehead so I figure if you can do that in a PG-13 movie you can bite some heads off.”

Venom hits the silver screen on October 7.