With the year heading into its final two weeks, it’s safe to call “Venom” one of the most divisive movies of 2018. The Sony tentpole, starring Tom Hardy as one of Spider-Man’s most iconic villains, is one of the worst reviewed movies of the year (it has a 29% on Rotten Tomatoes from nearly 300 reviews), and yet that hasn’t stopped it from being a massive popular hit. “Venom” is the fifth highest-grossing film of 2018 at the global box office with a haul of $852 million, and the character’s co-creator Todd McFarlane has an idea about the divide between critics and audiences.
“It was a big roller-coaster ride. Visually, everything was coming at you,” McFarlane recently told Yahoo Entertainment. “I think at times the critics get it wrong in that they forget their age. They come in, and they’re 42 years old, and they come in with their attitude and they’re going, ‘Stop it.’ What if you were 16 and you were watching this movie? You would love it.”
McFarlane created the Venom character with writer David Michelinie in a 1988 issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man.” While the comic book creator admitted he is biased when it comes to Venom, he said Hardy and director Ruben Fleischer properly brought his original vision for the antihero to the big screen.
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“This thing delivered everything it was supposed to. It was gnarly, it was nasty, it has a big cool Venom, which was what I was looking for. [That] was my bias — I just wanted to see the visualness of Venom that I had created 30 years prior,” he said.
McFarlane said “Venom” triumphed in comparison to the character’s inclusion in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 3,” where Eddie Brock/Venom was played by Topher Grace.
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“When the Topher Grace character turned into Venom, he didn’t really add a lot of weight,” McFarlane said. “I intentionally made him bigger because I always wanted it to feel like Peter Parker/Spider-Man was going up against an elephant and there was no way he was ever going to push him over. So he was going to have to come up with another way to trip up the elephant, which was gonna be to use his brain instead of his brawn.”
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While “Venom” continues to make money overseas, the film is now available to purchase on digital HD and Blu-ray.
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