“Venom” Writers Tell…A Little

Hey…who’s in that Venom suit?

ComingSoon interviewed Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick about their upcoming film “Zombieland,” but got the writing team to talk a little bit about their work on the script for “Venom,” the bad guy Marvel character who’s getting his own movie.

Venom made an appearance in the much-lamented “Spider-Man 3.” Set all your criticisms of that movie aside for a minute and let the beleaguered baddie start over. Hey, it’s not often that a villain nabs the title role, right?

Needless to say, Reese and Wernick couldn’t reveal much about their plans (I think Marvel would spirit them away to a country that is not beholden to any international agreements about torture if they did). They couldn’t say if this Venom would be following up on what happened in “Spider-Man 3,” or if this would exist in a universe where that movie never happened. This is all they could say:

“Obviously, with a character like Venom there’s a ton of stuff to draw from,” Reese told us. “Then they had specific rules about the villain and the backstory and stuff like that, so there were certain things they wanted us… certain parameters they gave us. But largely we pitched them something and they liked it but they had changes, so we worked on the outline for a long time and then we wrote the script. So with Marvel and Sony and us it’s definitely very, very collaborative.”

Regarding the mention of Sony, remember, the Spider-Man movie franchise was started up before Marvel opened its own studio, so any Spider-Man related films and characters all will be made by Sony. Just thought I’d mention for you intellectual property and copyright aficionados.

Anyway, as you can see, they’re not revealing much. But what we do like to see about this is that the film seems to be well on track. The next question is who will play Venom? Few expect Topher Grace to return–although that’s not completely out of the question. Who would you like to see in the part? Hmmm…just for the heck of it, I’ll say Paul Dano. Why not?