Venom star Tom Hardy had his tongue in cheek when lamenting the loss of scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor.
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“There are scenes that aren’t in this movie,” Hardy answered when asked by ComicsExplained about his favorite scene to film.
“There are, like, 30 to 40 minutes’ worth of scenes that aren’t in this movie… all of them. Mad puppeteering scenes, dark comedy scenes. You know what I mean? They just never made it in.”
Producer Avi Arad told ComicBook.com an R-rating was never “a consideration” and the film was always going to be PG-13 to allow for younger audiences to see the film after familiarizing themselves with the character in comic books and cartoons.
Added producer Matt Tolmach, “There isn’t some phantom version of the movie. Everyone is asking us that. Is there an R-rated cut sitting there? There isn’t.”
While the Amazing Spider-Man producer didn’t want to make “a family film,” the filmmakers “wanted to push it as hard as we could, but also to make it accessible.”
Director Ruben Fleischer told us he turned to Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed boundaries-pushing The Dark Knight for inspiration, which teetered towards more graphic violence but maintained a PG-13 by creative cuts and refraining from showing actual depictions of harsher kills.
“We only ever talked about this movie as being PG-13,” he 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.”
Fleischer added the film goes to “the full limit” and that the filmmakers “don’t compromise Venom in any real way.”
“He’s as aggressive as fans could possibly hope for, I think,” he said.
The lighter rating also allows for a potential Spider-Man crossover down the line, should the first entry in Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters — not tethered to the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe, which utilizes the Sony-controlled Spider-Man as played by Tom Holland — prove fruitful enough for future cross-pollination.
Venom opens October 5.
