1. Comparisons To Earlier Superhero Films Are Wide Of The Mark
Sony
Venom isn't 'Catwoman' bad; it's not even Suicide Squad bad. For starters, there are actually endearing qualities to the film, and though it is an origin story of sorts, it never displays the kind of embarrassing approach to its source material like comic book movies of the early 2000s did.
This is a film perfectly at ease with the character's literary origins. It takes a diverging path to account for a lack of Spider-Man, but this is still a comic book movie - a silly one, yes, but one that never feels ashamed of its source material. Likewise, Venom manages to avoid the overly fan-service-y nature of Warner Bros.' DC films, preferring instead to tell an insular tale that can stand alone, whilst leaving all the world-building to a perfectly admissible post-credits sequence.
In the end, it's just a difficult feature to quantify. Audiences have long been used to bad comic book movies, or even ones that are so bad they're good, but Venom is the odd exception of a poorly made film nailing a select few concepts, and providing an amusing experience in doing so.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
