The Deleted Symbiote Scene That Would Have Changed Everything In Venom
The "Venom" franchise is arguably one of the more divisive in the superhero movie genre. The franchise begins with 2018's "Venom," which was widely panned by critics (via Variety) following its October 2018 release. It achieved a cult hit status with fans, as evidenced by its 82% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. "Venom" also did phenomenally well at the box office with an $853.5 million worldwide gross (via The Numbers).
"Venom" tells the origin story of the titular Spider-Man villain. When audiences first meet the character, he's just a human journalist named Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy). While investigating a story, Eddie encounters an alien life form that forms a symbiotic attachment to him and, together, they become Venom. Eddie's life changes in several ways, including developing a taste for humans when the Venom symbiote takes over.
Many of the critics cited in Variety's 2018 review round-up slammed "Venom" for its superficiality, positing that it glosses over a potentially compelling antihero story in favor of CGI effects. One reason for this critique may be that the film foregoes delving into the Venom symbiote's history to focus only on Eddie's arc, failing to add any depth to the journalist's new dark side. Additionally, the movie never explicitly says where the symbiote comes from. Instead, "Venom" opens mysteriously on a spacecraft containing four symbiotic lifeforms crashing in Malaysia. All but one of the specimens are recouped by the corrupt bioengineering corporation Life Foundation, who later uses them to mount a series of experiments on human test subjects.
In a 2018 CinemaBlend interview, director Ruben Fleischer revealed he initially had a completely different vision for the opening of "Venom" that would shed more light on the origin of symbiotes, possibly fleshing out Venom's character and giving him a clearer narrative arc.
Venom director Ruben Fleischer originally wanted to show the symbiotes' backstory
Marvel Comics provides a detailed history for the symbiotes, an alien race that hails from the planet Klyntar, especially as they relate to Venom and Spider-Man's respective comic book arcs. "Venom" director Ruben Fleischer told CinemaBlend in 2018 that, in the days of developing "Venom," he had planned to hew closer to the comics by giving the Venom symbiote more of a backstory.
"The beginning of the movie was a hard one," he told CinemaBlend. "Like, how much do we want to tell the backstory?" The director then shared, "There was a version [of the opening] where there was a planet crawling with tons of symbiotes that were collected and taken back to Earth by the Life Foundation. They had encountered them." However, Fleischer opted to tweak the opening, explaining that "my instinct was it would be better to keep it more mysterious and just know that they've retrieved something from space. We don't know exactly by what means or how."
Though "Venom: Let There be Carnage" spotlights the conflict between Eddie-Venom and serial killer-fellow symbiote host Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson), future films may elaborate on the symbiotes' origin story, either in the "Venom" or "Spider-Man" franchises, respectively. After the "Venom" sequel teased a crossover into the "Spider-Man" universe with a cameo from Tom Holland's Peter Parker, viewers aren't sure what's next on the horizon for Venom and Eddie — but we likely haven't seen the last of them.