Todd McFarlane Tells The Truth About Comic Source Material - Exclusive
It's nearly impossible for any adaptation — especially superhero adaptations, where there's often decades of continuity — to be fully source accurate. Almost every superhero movie has made some kind of notable change, be it different origin stories, personalities, motivations, or methods. Some of this is present in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" –- such as Cletus and Carnage not being fully symbiotic, even though their comics progenitors are more connected than Venom and Eddie.
Bits like this often bother fans. They do not bother Todd McFarlane, the co-creator of Venom.
McFarlane noted to Looper that he had no involvement with "Venom: Let There Be Carnage," but is quick to point out that "it doesn't bug me and two, it wasn't necessary." He wasn't asked, and would have assisted if requested, but also acknowledges that "my contributions to it was at the very beginning, over 30 years ago and there's been a lot of evolution and a lot of other people put their fingerprints on it."
This makes McFarlane an authority on whether source material should matter for superhero movies. As he clinically points out, it doesn't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.
Entertainment matters most
"It's not necessary to be loyal to any sort of prior piece of work or to be sort of abstract from it," McFarlane insists. "What it is, is to entertain enough people so that you have a success and you can do another one." He acknowledges that there will always be people upset about an adaptation being loyal to the source material, whether it's comics, novels, or anything else brought to screen. "You can't be worried about that. What you have to do is say, 'Hey, the globe is 8 billion people. Can we now gather enough of them so that they enjoy it so that we get our money back plus a little bit so that we can do it again and then maybe again and maybe in best case again?' And go at it."
McFarlane is an artist, but he's also a CEO, and he approaches these things from a business perspective. There are certain things that matter more than fidelity to the source material: "One, do they just look visually cool? Are they fun? Are they fun to look at with your eyeballs? Because you're going to be in a dark room for two hours so there should be something that's enjoyable to look at. Check. And then two, was the story entertaining enough? Were the characters compelling? The action intriguing enough that when I walked out of that dark room that I could say to myself, 'Hey, were those two hours worth my ten bucks?' And if the answer is yes ... then I think everybody accomplished what they did."
"Venom: Let There Be Carnage" is now available on digital, 4K UHD, Blu-Ray, and DVD.