When Venom: The Last Dance rolls into theaters, it will conclude a trilogy of films that kicked off what seems to be a trend at Sony Pictures: Movies and stories set in a universe that’s adjacent to Spider-Man action, and focusing on Spider-Man villains, but they don’t include Spider-Man. This has allowed some of these films to take chances. Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web, for example, told a bit of a prequel story that featured a newborn Peter Parker. Strange. And Morbius… well, Morbius did its own thing.
And so, too, did the Venom franchise, once it found its footing. These movies largely have been driven by Tom Hardy’s sensibilities. They lean into a physical comedy that Hardy seems to appreciate, and Venom: The Last Dance includes more of the unexpected than even its immediate predecessors. But when I got the chance to interview Hardy and his director Kelly Marcel about Venom: The Last Dance, I found out that their biggest challenge was more of a technical one, and it involved the visual effects used to bring the symbiote to life.
As Hardy told CinemaBlend:
Do you know what's incredible is that, the visual effects are getting better and better, but one of the challenges in this movie was that we wanted to see Venom during the daylight. Because that's a particularly difficult exposition. It's a huge exposure point for Venom. At nighttime, you can technically hide a multitude of sins. Because he's dark. The night is dark. You can probably get more bang for your buck. So taking him and bringing him into the daylight was a huge technical shift for the team.
It wasn’t until Tom Hardy said this that I realized how many of Venom’s scenes in the previous two movies were set at night, and in the dark. Which, as he says, is an easy way to semi-hide the jet-black antihero when you are using visual effects to bring Venom to life. But because we got used to seeing Venom in the shadow of night, it made scenes like this rave sequence from Venom: Let There Be Carnage pop out all the more.
But when you look at the trailers for Venom: The Last Dance, it’s evident that Tom Hardy and Kelly Marcel succeeded in bringing the character into the light. Most of the major set pieces in the upcoming sequel are drenched in the sunlight of the desert, or even the artificial neon glow of Las Vegas, where Eddie and his symbiote partner detour. There’s no denying that the visual effects used to bring the symbiotes to life in the Venom series have improved over time, meaning Sony is ahead of the technical curve if they wanted to continue telling larger symbiote stories in upcoming Spider-Man projects.
You will be able to see Venom: The Last Dance when it opens in theaters on Oct. 25. Is this truly the end for Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock? Time will tell.
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