The Amazing Spider-Man producers discuss the Venom movie… and Spidey joining The Avengers

Earlier this year Sony announced that Chronicle director Josh Trank was developing a live-action movie based around the popular Marvel villain Venom and now The Amazing Spider-Man producers Avi Arad and Matthew Tolmach have briefly updated the status of the Spidey spin-off in an interview with Hollywood.com.

Unsurprisingly given the success of Marvel’s The Avengers, Tolmach has teased the possibility of Venom eventually crossing over with the world of The Amazing Spider-Man, which of course stars Andrew Garfield as everyone’s favourite wall-crawler. However, for the time being, the plan is for Venom to serve as an origin story / reboot centred around the character of Eddie Brock, who was previously portrayed by Topher Grace (That ’70s Show, Predators) in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3.

“It’s an Eddie Brock story,” says Arad. “We want to be as close to the comics as possible. Especially in Eddie Brock’s story. But again, pseudo-sceince is becoming science. All these tidbits about webs, artificial webs, is a huge industry now. Spiderwebs have unique qualities that will be huge for communications, fibers, and so forth. So we have taken the approach that we want to make the huge amazing movie about Eddie.”

Arad also elaborated on the proposed storyline for Venom in an interview with Crave Online: “As you know, Venom is defender of the innocent. The only guy he really, really hates is Peter Parker, Spider-Man. The reason you didn’t see more development on Venom in the comics is because this power that he was given, he knew who Peter was, he knew who Spider-Man was, so go kill him already. We always struggle with storylines and you see the new Venom books. It’s Flash in Iraq. We know that if we put him in a certain position and concentrate on the human, not on the creature, which I thought was a really good beginning in [Spider-Man 3].”

Meanwhile, Arad has also teased the possibility of Sony’s Spider-Man teaming up with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes for a potential Avengers sequel: “Everything is possible. If something like that happens, it’s great for Disney, it’s great for Sony. If the right story comes in, we are now working on Venom first. It’s our first out. So our thinking is in the right direction. Avengers to me was an expected success so I never looked at it because Avengers was successful.”