When it was first announced that Sony was moving ahead with its long-planned Venom solo movie, many expected the studio to follow Fox’s lead with Deadpool and Logan by going down the R-rated route.
However, as we know now, Venom is rated PG-13, and according to producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, the plan was never to go beyond this, with Arad in particular feeling that an R-rating is completely unnecessary for the character.
“To me, R is not a consideration,” said Arad, former chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment. “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.”
“There isn’t some phantom version of the movie,” added Tolmach, dismissing rumours that an R-rated version could be released at a later date. “Everyone is asking us that. Is there an R-rated cut sitting there? There isn’t. We came into this production and the development of the movie wanting to make a movie that was true to Venom, true to the comics, and true to the character, but at the same time is a movie that 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds can see. We had to push right up against it. We’re 15+ in England. It’s not like we just wanted to make a family film. We wanted to push it as hard as we could, but also to make it accessible. That was always the goal.”
Previous rumours have suggested that Sony wanted a PG-13 rating as the studio still has ambitions of tying the movie and its other Spidey spinoffs in with Spider-Man: Homecoming and Marvel Studios’ wider cinematic universe, and the feeling was that an R-rating would prevent this from happening. Nevertheless, Eddie Brock himself Tom Hardy has recently discussed the possibility of going down the R road for a potential sequel, stating that he’d be open to the idea.
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One of Marvel’s most enigmatic, complex and badass characters comes to the big screen, starring Academy Award nominated actor Tom Hardy as the lethal protector Venom.
Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland), Venom is set for release on October 5th 2018 and features a cast that includes Tom Hardy, Riz Ahmed, Michelle Williams, Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Reid Scott, Scott Haze, Sope Aluko and Ron Cephas Jones.
