‘Venom 3’ Is Headed to Theaters
Venom made $856 million worldwide. Venom: Let There Be Carnage made $502 million worldwide as the movie industry was just beginning to recover from the financial effects of the Covid pandemic. Did you really think they weren’t going to make a Venom 3?
Well, they are. (Duh.) At their presentation at this year’s CinemaCon trade show, Sony officially announced that a third Venom movie is in development. They made no announcement of stars, directors, or writers, but it would be ludicrous to imagine that Tom Hardy would not at least be back as both Eddie Brock and the voice of his deranged yet heroic symbiote.
Last year’s Let There Be Carnage had Hardy’s Venom square off with Woody Harrelson’s Carnage, a deranged serial killer with his own sadistic symbiote. While the film seemed to set up a fight between Spider-Man and Venom in any potential sequel, a post-credits scene in No Way Home undid all that, as it sent Hardy and Venom back to their own tangential Sony universe of Marvel characters. Where the characters go from there is anyone’s guess, although Morbius did hint at a potential super-villain team-up at some point down the line.
Sony controls the rights to the Spider-Man movie franchise, and has the ability to make movies based on characters who’ve appeared in Spider-Man comics, like Venom. So far, though, Venom and its sequel are the only successes they’ve had in trying to expand their Spider-Man franchise beyond Spidey himself. The aforementioned (and long delayed) Morbius bombed with critics and did just as poorly with audiences; to date it’s earned just $156 million worldwide.
Sony is already working on movies for Spider-Man side characters like Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter, and today they also announced that Bad Buddy would star in yet another Spider-Man spinoff called El Muerto. But there’s no guarantee that any of those movies will hit the way Venom has. So it’s not surprising at all that they plan to continue that series as well.