Sony's... Surprisingly Well-Conceived VENOM Films

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Harbinger O Great Justice
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The Japanese poster is amazing:

VENOM-poster.jpg






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Kotaku recently did a little article about Kouji Tajima about how far he's come as a concept artist.

While going through his Twitter, I found out that he's the one in charge of the design for Venom: https://twitter.com/Kouji_Tajima/status/1024427543171031040

Also, he did character designs for Alita: Battle Angel
https://twitter.com/Kouji_Tajima/status/1021527131354882048

As well as creature & background design for Godzilla: King of the Monsters
https://twitter.com/Kouji_Tajima/status/1020760738380435456





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I feel its like cutting off their nose in order to smell something in the future.
People already dont really care about this, why make the product even less appealing in order to open the door for something you need people to give a shit about? No one's going to care about Venom if it's pg13 . At least not enough to justify this already stupid plan Sony has with the spiderverse.
 

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While it's rumored, I have a small piece of anecdotal evidence that seems to suggest otherwise.

I went to see The Meg the other day, and the Venom trailer was edited for content.
• The scene of the guy on the floor being overwhelmed by the symbiote had the CGI of the symbiote taken out.
• The scene of Eddie's leg being snapped back into place was missing.
• Venom says he'll eat the guys arms and legs, but references to face-eating have been removed.

If they're censoring that stuff for PG-13-in-theater trailers, but not for the main internet trailers, it kind of suggests that the film definitely already has a lot of non-PG-13 content that people are familiar with. I feel like the film's gonna be what it's gonna be, and if Logan & Deadpool haven't given Sony the confidence that making an R-Rated film that deserves to be R-Rated, I don't think anything will.





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In case anybody else wants the heads up, I just heard from my theater that they're gonna be opening up tickets for sale on Friday. That also likely means that we'll get to find out the official rating of the film and see if it lands as R or gets bumped to PG-13.

If it's PG-13, it's likely the result of some studio fighting to get in easy access for a younger demographic, and probably some battles with the MPAA over exactly what they're allowed to show, and what they can't (since the MPAA's process is notoriously shady as hell).

If it does land the R, then they're likely holding off to the last possible second, so that they have the smallest amount of time with exposure around it being talked about as a dark, violent, R-Rated film and get a bigger press hit for it (hopefully) being well-received and successful that'll help ensure that interested parties will still go see it, like they did with Deadpool and Logan.

Either way, I'd be ready for that news to be ALL. OVER. the Internet on Friday, and given that their Twitter does Eddie's Clubhouse posts every Friday, I'd be really surprised if they don't address it if they go soft on the rating.



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Looks like Sony managed to fight for their PG-13 rating. Looks like we'll have ta see if that means that they bullied the MPAA for most of it but cut out a couple little grotesqueries, or if we'll be getting the REAL version unrated on the BluRay release.

Additionally, there's a tie-in comic being released digitally tomorrow, so there's also the possibility that there's SOME degree of them trying to play more nicely with Marvel for maintaining cross-over potential – especially what with Marvel having the Fox stuff back under their roof, Sony are really the only outside players who really want a piece of that.


Either way, I am still excite & I'll make sure to poast about the comic.



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Insofar as the comic: It looks like it's basically a trailer in comic form. It seems like they've just carved out a few scenes from the film and made them in comic book format, so you're likely to see some stuff here that you haven't in trailers as well. Overall, I'd skip it since anything in there's stuff you'll be seeing in the film. That being said, I really like the tone of things that they put in there. It makes it feel like they have the vision of the film like they would be making a comic, so hopefully that translates well.

Got my tickets and whatnot for it. Hooray for seeing Symbiotes in 3D!




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How they're using the Lethal Protector to help establish an origin for Venom sans Spider-Man. Apparently IGN's gonna be releasing these all week. I'll probably just edit them into this poast unless there's something REALLY interesting / deserving of its own update.




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So, the other IGN videos so far did felt like they were worth a new poast. :monster:

This is really neat about how they manage the special effects for Venom with his performance.

This one is a LITTLE bit spoilery for the very beginning, but really cool about how they adopted some Planet of the Symbiotes stuff.



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On the subject of the film's depiction of its br00tal1ty: (Minor spoilers) It looks like they were (unsurprisingly) always prepping to play the rating game with the MPAA for PG-13. Given that Sony's a big studio and how late into things they actually GOT their PG-13 rating, I'd have to say it seems like they still worked really hard to get the most that they could possibly get away with – which is quite a bit when it comes to major studios, depending on how you set things up.

For example, Team America: World Police shot a ton of footage they didn't want, just so that when the MPAA told them to cut things, they'd lost things they didn't want anyway. There's a lot of things that films can do if you make the MPAA feel like you're shooting for a harder rating, and you're giving them something to get the rating you actually want. I know I probably say this all the time, but I really can't recommend This Film Is Not Yet Rated hard enough when it comes to getting a sense of how this game gets played.

It's pretty apparent that Venom always wanted to be as close as is physically possible to the border of the R & PG-13 ratings, but sticking on the PG-13 side because of the marketing options and audience – especially because, “Market research showed that the biggest fan base for Venom is ten-year-old boys in South America”which is why the first look of Venom was revealed at ComicCon Brazil, and also Tom Hardy's oldest son who was really influential in him taking the role for the film is also 10 years old.

They played this game perfectly. Now it's just up to see how it does in theaters later this week.




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Tiny spoilers: The director talking about using Lethal Protector as a Spider-Man-less origin story for Venom. While I'm likely in the minority, I still really like this non-Spidey take on him. It'll be really interesting to see how they interpret it specifically, but I've always been on board for the situation the film's in, and owning that version of the character, while still being as true to both Eddie, the Symbiote, and their relationship itself as possible. Given that it'll drop in the UK before the US, I'm also likely gonna be going news dark on the movie after today, so that I can hit the movie without knowing any more.



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Tom Hardy says in an interview that the best scenes were about 40 minutes that didn't make it into the film :awesome:. To be fair, his co-star then said "that's because they weren't good", but still.

I will be seeing this film, but only for social reasons :P.

Granted, Alec Guinness didn't like Star Wars, iirc. So maybe Venom will be a really good film? :monster:.
 

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Haha, yeah I saw that interview. Also, he didn't say they were the best scenes, so much as they were his favourite scenes he filmed. Also, on the note of Riz & Tom – they've known each other for a good long while, and give each other a lot of shit in a friends-who-make-fun-of-each-other kind of way, so it's worth knowing there's some good natured jabs at each other in that interview, at least more than you'd get out of most costars who only know each other from the current film.

I think that the kind of things Tom Hardy really enjoys doing as an actor involve a lot of experimenting with the tone and possibility of the character in ways that might not've really been able to fit in narratively, or maybe tonally, but might've still been really enjoyable to do. I think that one of the scenes he mentioned was about puppetry and dark comedy, and even just with those hints, there're a lot of fun things he might've done that might not've made the cut, but absolutely would've been a shitton of fun for him to do as an actor.

I really do hope that they have some of those things kept around as unused footage if they weren't complete enough to do as deleted scenes, since from the interviews and such he's clearly had a damn lot of fun getting into both Eddie Brock and Venom's heads, and playing around in that space. One of the things that I'm really glad about is the fact that he was always first pick for the character, because I think that it let him have a lot of fun since there was a lot designed around the type of actor he is.

The world premiere is happening right now, so I'd expect early thoughts on the film to be happening rather soon across the Internets.




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Harbinger O Great Justice
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Insofar as I can tell, that's not legit since I can't find any mention of it elsewhere, but *shrug*

After that new Into the SpiderVerse trailer though, I'm wiling to give Sony Pictures the benefit of the doubt on Spider films for now. :mon:




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