Venom

Ruben Fleischer’s film is not quite the genre the poster promises. This works less as a superhero film than as a two hander comedy about a man arguing with his own body, and its best stretch is the middle half hour where Eddie and the voice inside him negotiate. The symbiote is barely present in the first thirty minutes, so anyone who came for Venom sits through a long fall from grace first. The second warning is the finale. The closing fight is between two symbiotes, staged at night, and both are dark shifting masses that look alike, which makes it hard to track who is winning. If you want a legible, practically staged fight, this is not that film. Sony kept the rating below an R so the character could still meet Spider-Man and the Marvel side later. The result is an odd balance: the head biting from the comics survives, but the blood is drained out. Tom Hardy improvised heavily, the lobster tank scene was not in the script, and he says thirty to forty minutes of his favourite material was cut. Michelle Williams wrote one of her own lines. Reviews were largely cold while audiences went the other way. The film took 80.3 million dollars on its opening weekend, a record October opening at the time.