Sony Pictures gets the ball rolling on a sequel to Venom

As VENOM went on to gross $855 million worldwide, it should come as no surprise that Sony Pictures have gotten the ball rolling on a sequel. Variety reports that Kelly Marcel, one of the writers of the first film, has closed a "significant" deal to pen the script for the sequel as well as serve as executive producer.

Tom Hardy will obviously return as Eddie Brock/Venom, and it's expected that Michelle Williams will be joining him as well as Woody Harrelson, who played Carnage in VENOM's post-credit sequence. As far as director Ruben Fleischer returning to helm the follow-up, Variety says that Sony may be looking for a new director as Fleischer will be busy shooting the ZOMBIELAND sequel. Any ideas on who should take the gig? Sony Pictures recently dated an untitled sequel film for an October 2020 release, which many are assuming will be VENOM 2.

Although Woody Harrelson's appearance as Cletus Kasady/Carnage at the close of VENOM was obviously meant to set up a sequel, Ruben Fleischer purposfully held off on introducing the character until the very end as he wanted the first film to establish the character of Eddie Brock and his bond with Venom.

We’d like to think that this movie will expand to other movies and Carnage is, I think, the most beloved of the Venom adversaries, with the exception of probably Spider-Man. And so we definitely didn’t want to include Carnage in this first movie because it felt like we wanted to establish Eddie and Venom and so that’s why we worked having Riot as our main adversary. But the intention or the ambition was to show that there are legs for the franchise in that a fan favorite let alone played by Woody Harrelson would be something we could look forward to in the future.

As for how Cletus Kasady will become bonded with the Carnage symbiote, Ruben Fleischer hasn't thought that far ahead. In the comics, Eddie Brock wound up as Cletus Kasady's cellmate, but Fleischer didn't want to end the film with Brock in jail, but he did make sure to leave the two characters in "jail cell proximity" in order to leave the door open. It's too early to say whether VENOM will get a sequel, but if it does, and if Carnage is unleashed, Fleischer is looking forward to witnessing Woody Harrelson explore his darker side once again. "When you think about a guy named Cletus, and off the comic book pages what he might be like, this insane serial killer, if you think about Woody in Natural Born Killers and the menace that he brought to that character, I think it’s really exciting to think about him going to that darker place again," Flesicher said. "Because recently he’s been playing more kind of heroic or comedic parts so to see him going to that kind of darker space, I think, is going to be incredible."