The INSANE Venom Movie That Nearly Got Made

By Jack Pooley / February 1, 2022

The first solo movie starring Marvel's iconic supervillain Venom was of course released in 2018, starring Tom Hardy and directed by Zombieland's Ruben Fleischer.

But the road to this point is marked by more than 20 years of failed projects and disappointing attempts to make the symbiote bond with mainstream audiences.

Though Venom is certainly riding high in Hollywood right now per two successful movies with a third already in the works, for a long time it truly felt like a Venom solo franchise was doomed to stay shuttered away in development hell forever more.

Even with Venom becoming known to the masses through his supporting villainous role in Spider-Man 3 (as played by Topher Grace), it was more than a decade before the character re-appeared on our screens.

It certainly wasn't for lack of trying to make Venom happen, though, as between 1997 and 2018, a mind-boggling six separate attempts were made to get a film off the ground, with the last finally sticking.

But there's one prospective, unmade Venom movie in particular that's generated a lot of discussion online. Yet before we get into that, let's quickly run down the other Venom projects that ultimately went kaput...

6. The Graveyard Of Failed Venom Movies

It all began in 1997, when future Dark Knight Saga writer David S. Goyer penned a Venom script for New Line Cinema, which was set to star Dolph Lundgren as Eddie Brock in a film that would pit him against his nemesis Carnage.

But the rights were eventually picked up by Sony who pressed on with the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy instead, though following Spider-Man 3's release - which featured Venom - producer Avi Arad confirmed that a Venom spin-off was in development.

Issues with a planned fourth Raimi Spider-Man film slowed progress on Venom, as did Sony's lack of faith in Topher Grace as a leading man.

This version of the movie went through numerous scripts - including one from Deadpool's Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese - but once Sony decided to reboot the mainline Spider-Man franchise, they too opted for a new Venom.

By 2012, attempts were being made to assemble a Venom film connected to The Amazing Spider-Man, with the working title Venom Carnage and Alex Kurtzman (Transformers, Star Trek) set to co-write and direct.

Per the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, we know that Channing Tatum was angling to play Eddie Brock, though he fell out of contention after being cast as Gambit (which, as we all know, sadly never happened).

But this attempt also collapsed when The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed at the box office and Sony subsequently entered a partnership with Marvel Studios to bring Spider-Man to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This isn't to forget Todd McFarlane, the artist who first drew Venom in the Spider-Man comics and recently claimed that he pitched a Venom vs. Spawn movie to Sony in the past, which unsurprisingly never came to fruition either.

But this article will focus on the most intriguing and potential-rich failed attempt at a Venom solo movie, when in 2012 an on-the-rise filmmaker named Josh Trank was being courted for the job.

To say that he had an original vision for the IP is quite the understatement...

5. Josh Trank's Venom Was Basically An R-Rated Version Of The Mask

Shortly before the release of The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012, Sony was kicking around various ideas for a Venom movie and ended up bringing aboard Josh Trank, who had just received considerable acclaim for his low-fi superhero movie Chronicle.

Trank was invited to pitch his own take on Venom, and with his writing partner Robert Siegel came up with a radical hard-R-rated, character-driven take on the supervillain which he likened to the classic 1994 Jim Carrey action-comedy The Mask. Trank said:

"I thought this was an opportunity to make something really character-y, uncomfortable, and break ground in terms of having this super nuanced uncomfortable character story with the branding of a massive four quadrant superhero film... I immediately thought about The Mask. This could be like a really cool synthesis of everything about The Mask that I loved, but infused into the lore of this iconic Marvel character."

Trank and Siegel went away and prepared their story treatment, but hit a sad-if-predictable roadblock once they turned it over to Sony...

4. Sony Didn't Like Trank's "Uncomfortable" Venom Story

Trank and Siegel's treatment was apparently "hated" by Spider-Man producer Matt Tolmach, who recommended a totally different - and presumably far more sanitised - through-line for Venom, which Trank decided to walk away from. He said:

"I definitely miscalculated being within the studio system with that kind of aesthetic... We turned in the treatment, and they didn't like it. That kind of says everything."

Trank also opined bluntly on the strong-arming approach of producer Tolmach, which he didn't much care for:

"I didn't like how Matt Tolmach was coming at me in that situation, because it felt very kind of authoritative... Well, if you don't like what I'm doing, and you're telling me that I have to do something along the lines of what you want, and you're going to tell it to me in this way - sorry, but I have other things I can be doing."

And like that, Venom was back to the drawing board.

3. What Happened Next?

Josh Trank of course went on to instead helm Fox's ultimately doomed Fantastic Four reboot, the fallout of which led him to either be fired or resign from - depending on who you believe - an in-development Star Wars spin-off. After a five-year absence, Trank directed the Tom Hardy-starring Al Capone biopic Capone in 2020 to wildly mixed reviews.

As for Venom, following the implosion of the Amazing Spider-Man franchise, Sony had the good sense to devise a standalone Venom movie that would kickstart its own shared universe, later dubbed Sony's Spider-Man Universe, and this time it actually stuck.

In October 2017, Venom started principal photography under director Ruben Fleischer, with Tom Hardy starring opposite Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed.

And like that, the world waited anxiously to see how a 20-years-in-the-making Venom solo movie would turn out...

2. Did We Get The Best Venom Movie?

Was Venom successful? Absolutely - it made over $850 million worldwide. But was it actually good? That's more debatable, what with largely negative reviews but broadly positive notices from general audiences.

But trickier still, would the Josh Trank movie have been any better?

Commercially, the answer is 100% no - if Trank had been allowed to make an R-rated, character-driven riff on The Mask, it's incredibly unlikely it would've got even close to matching the 2018 film's level of financial success.

Sure, Todd Phillips' daring, R-rated standalone Joker movie ended up cracking over $1 billion worldwide, but that was an outlier, an exception that proved the rule. After all, it's much easier to sell a gritty Joker origin story to non-comic book fans than Trank's Venom pitch.

Quality-wise it's a far more interesting discussion. Chronicle absolutely proved that Trank's a talented filmmaker, but it's telling that this, the only one of his three movies he didn't also write, is the only one to be widely praised.

While it's possible that co-writer Robert Siegel could've helped straighten things out - he did write The Wrestler and Big Fan, after all - the riskiness of the premise would've worked hard against them both.

Pulling off a complex and challenging character study that's also an entertaining, effects-heavy superhero movie is no easy feat, and it would've been far more likely to go horribly wrong than actually succeed.

Trank's take at least sounded far more interesting than the fairly generic, mass market-friendly version we ended up with, and though the recent sequel was a marked improvement, it still feels like Venom is destined to remain neutered under the PG-13 umbrella.

For his own part, Trank seems genuinely thrilled that a version of Venom is now out there and has been such a huge success (commercially, at least):

"I'm so happy it did as well as it did as it's cool to know everyone loves Tom Hardy for that, and he's one actor out there who's really gonna go there while at the same time having real bonafide potential as an action star. It's so rare."

And finally, what does the future hold for the Lethal Protector and also for Josh Trank?