Spider-Man: 7 Reasons To Be Worried About Venom & Black Cat Spin-Offs

7. They've Ruined Venom Before

Okay, so Venom was very much a studio insistence in Spider-Man 3 against Sam Raimi's wishes, so the foundation for the character was never more than shaky to begin with, but he's such a popular figure that it should have been a swing for the fence. Unfortunately, Sony's writers imagined the iconic character as a monster of the week melded with some mid-life emo crisis allegory, proving they had absolutely no handle on what the character should be.

He should be R-Rated, he should be an anti-hero and he should fight Carnage. Whether any of that works in Sony's manifesto remains to be seen, but they definitely need to set out a different stall to the one we've already seen.

The reality of Venom is that his origin works best as a classic Alien rip-off (hence those irresistible rumours that Life was actually a secret Venom movie), with lots of horror, limited comic book pulpiness and a tone wildly at odds with what we've seen before. Given Sony's attraction to the lucrative family audience, there's no way that's going to happen.