10 Massively Missed Opportunities In Recent Movies

7. NOT Shooting For An R Rating - Venom

What Should've Happened

This one's simple - when a Tom Hardy-starring Venom movie was announced, everyone hoped against hope that Sony would have the courage to aim for an R rating rather than the more, uh, "family friendly" PG-13.

After all, this is a movie about an abominable symbiotic creature that eats people, and has a peculiar penchant for biting people's heads off.

With such an iconic antagonist at the core, and with the critical and commercial success of R-rated superhero movies like Deadpool and Logan fresh in the mind, there really wasn't any excuse not to aim for the mature crowd here.

What Actually Happened

Of course, the producers did what they usually do with movies like this - they talked vaguely about the possibility of an R rating in the months leading up to release while promising nothing, and a week or two before the movie hit screens, the sanitised PG-13 rating came in from the MPAA, much to everyone's disappointment.

Putting the overall quality of Venom's writing and direction aside for a moment, it's painfully clear throughout how aggressively the film has been neutered, with head-biting scenes awkwardly cropped and shied away from, and in turn failing to adequately convey the savage, otherworldly brutality of the character.

It's also a dumpster fire of old-hat ideas and tone-deaf "comedy", so there's that too. But at least with some brutal violence in the mix it wouldn't feel quite so stock and cynical.