Eddie Brock is an investigative journalist whose career and engagement to Anne Weying collapse after he confronts Carlton Drake, the head of the Life Foundation, a bio-engineering corporation. The company experiments with alien symbiotes brought back from a comet, lifeforms that need a living host to survive and often kill those they bond with. While Eddie looks into the matter on his own, he comes into contact with one of these beings, which attaches itself to his body and grants him superhuman abilities. The film focuses on the uneasy coexistence between the journalist and the creature, and on the pressure Drake applies to recover his experiments.

How it was made

The project grew out of Venom's appearance in Spider-Man 3 (2007), when Sony Pictures tried to develop a spin-off that stalled because of problems with its ongoing Spider-Man franchise. In March 2016 the idea was revived as the starting point of a shared universe built around Marvel characters whose film rights the studio held, although the film was ultimately distanced from Spider-Man. Columbia Pictures produced it in association with Marvel Entertainment. Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg and Kelly Marcel share the screenplay credit, with Marcel brought in to rewrite it. Ruben Fleischer directed, and Tom Hardy starred, playing both Eddie and the voice of Venom, which Hardy shaped as a blend of a lounge-singer swagger and a more sinister tone. Filming took place from October 2017 to January 2018 in Atlanta, New York and San Francisco. The main inspirations were the 1993 comic miniseries Venom: Lethal Protector and the 1995 storyline Planet of the Symbiotes. Ludwig Göransson composed the score, his second Marvel film after Black Panther (2018).

Reception and legacy

The film received largely negative reviews from critics, although Hardy's performance and the relationship between Eddie and the symbiote were praised. It opened in the United States on October 5, 2018, and became the seventh highest-grossing film of the year, earning about $856.1 million worldwide and setting several box office records for an October release. Its commercial success led to two sequels, Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) and Venom: The Last Dance (2024), and helped establish Sony's Spider-Man Universe. Within the history of Marvel adaptations it is often cited as an example of a project that combined poor critical notices with strong box office returns.