‘Venom’ Receives Its Rotten Tomatoes Score

Venom is set to bring a whole new side of Marvel Comics movies to the big screen this weekend, and now we have an idea of how critics are responding to it.

Rotten Tomatoes recently updated their website with the preliminary score for Venom, which currently sits at 28% percent.

At the moment, this classifies the film as “rotten”, with a majority of the reviews being negative. In order for Venom to reach a “fresh” rating, it would need at least 75% positive reviews, once at least 80 reviews are counted.

Granted, the score for Venom will definitely change in some form over the opening weekend, as more reviews are published and then compiled by Rotten Tomatoes. But this does indicate what the earliest critical reception is for the film, something that is mirrored by the Twitter reactions that were released earlier this week.

ComicBook.com’s own Brandon Davis said that the film “doesn’t know if it wants to be gritty, funny, tough, or something else entirely. When a random feeling bout of hip hop music takes over the theater’s speakers early on, it feels as though Venom is trying to identify as something else which has worked for other movies, but suffers from never committing to a certain tone.”

Venom will follow Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) as he becomes inhabited by the titular symbiote while investigating Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) and the Life Foundation.

Venom has quite a lot of potential currently riding on it, as it serves as the inaugural entry in the SUMC, or Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters. For better or for worse, the goal has been for Venom to push boundaries wherever it can, even with a PG-13 rating.

“We only ever talked about this movie as being PG13,” director Ruben Fleischer explained to ComicBook.com. “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.”

Even with spinoffs for Morbius, Black Cat, Silver Sable, and Jackpot all in the works at Sony, it sounds like there’s one character in particular that those involved with Venom hope to cross over with.

“I think there’s a pretty obvious one inherent to the Venom franchise that for whatever reason couldn’t be included in the film.” Fleischer told ComicBook.com. “But I will say that I look forward to future movies where said character could perhaps run across Venom. Nothing would be more exciting to see than a face off with Spider-Man.”

What do you think of Venom‘s early Rotten Tomatoes score? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Venom will be released in theaters on October 5th.