Why Tom Hardy Is Sad About Venom Cuts
Spider-Man spin-offs "most fun" scenes ended up on the cutting room floor...
By the time you've seen Sony's stand-alone Venom, you will no doubt have chosen a favourite moment. Even if it turns out to be disappointing, it's likely that SOMETHING will stick out as better or more entertaining than the rest of it. That's just maths.
However, there's one person whose favourite Venom moment definitely isn't in the finished movie and that's star Tom Hardy himself, who spoke in an interview with ComicsExplained to lament the fact that his most enjoyable scenes simply didn't make it. They were filmed, one way or another, but certain creative decisions seem to have guided the project away from what might have been initially.
As Hardy said: "There are like 30 to 40 minutes worth of scenes that aren’t in this movie... all of them. Mad puppeteering scenes, dark comedy scenes. You know what I mean? They just never made it in."
We're all being assured that Hardy's comments don't relate to a mythical R-rated cut that was trimmed to be a PG-13, because no such cut was ever even planned, let alone existing. Both producer Matt Tolmach and director Ruben Fleisher have confirmed the intent was always to go with the softer, more family-friendly rating, so it's not like Hardy can be decrying the decision to take the sting out of the film for that reason.
Fleisher seems intent on not kicking off some sort of Snyder-Cut-like crusade for the "real" film to be released:
"We only ever talked about this movie as being PG-13. What I've said in the past is that we wanted to push the violence to the hilt. The Dark Knight was always a huge reference point for me, personally, just as far as how far you could take a PG-13."
To be fair to Fleisher, it IS possible to push violence and stick to a PG-13 rating. Christopher Nolan managed it with The Dark Knight in 2008 thanks to some creativity and suggestion. It's just that the trailers for Venom looked to be aimed squarely at an entirely different audience: an audience bred on the R-rated sensibilities of Logan and Deadpool, who were expecting a purer expression of the comic book character. Which definitely can't happen anywhere but in an R-rated movie.
By the sound of it, Hardy is part of that group. Or at the very least, reading between the lines a little, it definitely sounds like he may have been missold the film at the very least. Riz Ahmed definitely does well to direct the flow of the conversation away from Hardy necessarily shooting on the production, but there's undoubtedly a kernel of truth in what Hardy is saying. What he loved most about shooting the film ended up not being in it.
Consider the situation for Hardy. He's a critically acclaimed actor with the luxury of choice in his career now. He can turn anything he wants to down, so why would he pick something where the studio would be so willing to cut out the things he enjoyed shooting the most? Could it be that Hardy was told that the production was going to be an opportunity to have some fun and more importantly a chance to do something for a very committed fan-base?
In the interview, he does talk about fan ownership and the pressure of having to cater to those demands while also making a film that works for the studio and it does feel like there's a little reticence to his voice. A quiet acceptance that perhaps it wasn't possible at all to make the film that fans would want or that he personally wanted?
Taking the jokier spirit of the aftermath of Hardy's comments aside, this is not a great look for Sony to have to deal with basically on the eve of the release of Venom. It sounds very much like Hardy has just openly admitted that the most entertaining sequences (the ones that were most fun to make is basically the same thing to anyone on the outside) were cut as a compromise to making the film the studio wanted. That's going to be hard to come back from if initial audience reactions aren't an absolute smash out of the park.