‘Venom’: Why the Symbiotes Come to Earth Revealed

In less than a month, Sony Pictures‘ first Spider-Man spinoff movie will be in theaters, giving fans their first look at Wall Crawler’s most popular enemy in Venom.

But with Venom getting his own film comes a lot of changes to the character’s origin, which won’t be dependent on Spider-Man or the symbiote’s comic origin in Secret War. Instead, the symbiote alien will have a different reason for coming to Earth.

“We see, at the beginning of the film, the moment when the symbiotes are collected up by a Life Foundation space probe, which finds them on a comet drifting through space, approaching Earth. And the space probe is out there looking for signs of life, and they can’t believe their luck. There’s life signals everywhere, all across this asteroid,” VFX supervisor Paul Franklin told IGN.

It turns out there’s a reason the symbiotes are heading toward Earth, as they’re searching for life for their own purposes.

“The symbiotes seem to actively want to be collected. Because it’s all part of their plan to come to Earth. They’re looking for planets where they can find hosts to inhabit,” Franklin said. “They’ve never really found a place where they can exist in harmony with the life forms of whatever planet they find themselves on.”

But the Life Foundation, run by Riz Ahmed’s character Carlton Drake, is not the altruistic company that it presents itself to be, according to production designer Oliver Scholl.

“The fun thing about the Life Foundation is that it’s a cover. Character-wise, it’s a cover,” Scholl said. “The company itself is supposed to be this beautiful, perfect scientific endeavor for all mankind, while actually, it’s just the dark cover-up for doing scientific experiments that are going a bit too far, and using people for things that are non-ethical. And besides that, being treasonous, teaming up with aliens to take over Earth. So, that’s not really healthy.”

The Venom symbiote seems to be unique in that it is able to cooperate and exist alongside Eddie Brock, which will be the focus of the film. It remains to be seen if that’s an isolated incident or if other symbiotes will find similar footing with their human hosts.

“We see several different symbiotes. We’ve got different colored symbiotes. We understand that Venom isn’t just a one-off organism,” Franklin said. “This is a completely new thing for the symbiotes. The Venom symbiote finds Eddie Brock, finds he can live in equilibrium with him. That there’s a balance that can be found there.”

Venom premieres in theaters on October 5th.