For a while it seemed as though Sony Pictures would be following in the footsteps of DEADPOOL and LOGAN and let VENOM play around in an R-rated world, but if the studio is holding out hope of perhaps folding Venom into the larger Marvel Universe, that R-rating could have proved to be a stumbling block in the future. So, in news which should surprise no one but will likely disappoint some, VENOM has officially received a PG-13 rating.
We reached out to Sony Pictures to confirm the news, and the studio also revealed VENOM's run-time, which will be coming in at 1 hour and 52 minutes. I never really expected that VENOM would walk away with an R-rating, but a PG-13 doesn't mean that the film won't be pushing the envelope. VENOM director Ruben Fleischer told Total Film last month that he wasn't entirely certain how the MPAA would react to the film. "We're curious to see where it'll land. But we pushed the envelope as far as we possibly could in terms of just making it the most true to the comics version of the film that we could," Fleischer said. "He's a character that goes around biting people's heads off and eating brains. So we tried to respect that as much as we could."
VENOM will star Tom Hardy (DUNKIRK) as Eddie Brock, a journalist desperate to get his career back on track after a recent scandal. While investigating the Life Foundation and its mysterious leader, Dr. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), Brock is exposed to an alien symbiote which bonds with him and gives him extraordinary powers.
VENOM will hit theaters on October 5, 2018.