How ‘Venom’ Movie Thrives Without Spider-Man

Director Ruben Fleischer doesn’t seem to have a worry in the world about his Venom movie being isolated from Spider-Man and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Marvel Comics fans have long known Venom as a character often reliant on Spider-Man stories to fuel his own but the anti-hero’s Sony Pictures film won’t exist in the big screen world where Peter Parker resides. The Venom movie, instead, will capitalize on the opportunity to differentiate itself from an otherwise crowded market of super hero films.

“I’m a huge fan of comic book movies so I just tried to pick a lane that was true to the character,” Fleischer told ComicBook.com in the video above. “I think inherent to the character, he’s just darker, and we talked about more violent. It’s just tonally different from everything else, especially when you’re focusing on just Venom. He’s not a sunshine kind of guy. So, it takes place at night. It’s darker. More menacing. I think that within the spectrum of all these movies, there’s the DC super dark, Zack Snyder type version and then there’s the Marvel movies and I like to think that we’re in our own zone apart from that.”

Still, Fleischer admits he would like to one day see the two Marvel characters come face to face on the big screen. “I think we can all agree it would be pretty amazing to see Spider-Man and Venom face off in a film,” Fleischer said during Sony’s Hall H panel. “I have to think that the studio is thinking the same way and at some point down the road they’re gonna run across each other’s paths.”

In separating Venom from Spider-Man, the Venom movie will do its best to honor the pages of Marvel Comics which made fans fall in love with the popular anti-hero.

“Our movie wants to honor the comics as close as we can tonally,” Fleischer said. “In the comics, he bites people’s heads off and eats brains. It would be weird to make a movie with Venom if he wasn’t doing that. We tried to honor it as closely as possible. This is definitely a darker, more violent, more vicious Marvel character than I think anyone’s ever seen before.”

Whether or not this means the film will earn an R-rating is uncertain, but Fleischer and company seem to be hinting towards such a scenario. “Venom is, by far, for me the…coolest Marvel super hero that there is,” Venom star Tom Hardy said during Sony’s Hall H panel. “I just like the way he looks first and foremost. Then, also, there’s my son and he’s a massive Venom fan. He was a very strong influence on me as to why I ought to play Venom specifically…So I did something where I bite people’s heads off which my son can’t see.”

Venom is set for release on October 5, 2018.