Today was the press junket for The Amazing Spider-Man and we had an exclusive interview with producers Avi Arad and Matthew Tolmach. We’ll have the full interview for you and more before Amazing Spidey opens July 3, but some breaking news came out of the conversation. In fact, when we asked Arad and Tolmach their thoughts on Spider-Man 3 (more in the full interview), they started talking plans for a Venom movie, which Tolmach describes as a “cousin to Spider-Man.”
A Venom movie would make Eddie Brock the hero. It won’t be until he crosses paths with Peter Parker that he becomes a villain.
“As you know, Venom is defender of the innocent,” Arad said. “The only guy he really, really hates is Peter Parker, Spider-Man. The reason you didn’t see more development on Venom in the comics is because this power that he was given, he knew who Peter was, he knew who Spider-Man was, so go kill him already. We always struggle with storylines and you see the new Venom books. It’s Flash in Iraq. We know that if we put him in a certain position and concentrate on the human, not on the creature, which I thought was a really good beginning in 3.”
They do know fans weren’t happy with Spider-Man 3 and I pressed them on Venom and Emo Peter Parker. Tolmach acknowledges they may have given Venom short shrift, so now he’ll get his very own movie.
“The truth is he also deserves his own movie,” Tolmach said. “We’ve been sitting around in a room talking about Venom stories and it’s a really full bodied complicated character, Eddie Brock and this character. Maybe people feel there wasn’t enough of a chance to unravel it, but we’re all in on him.”
So would the plan be to merge this Venom with Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man in a later movie? “All things are possible someday,” Tolmach carefully implied, which come on, almost definitely means they haven’t signed the contracts yet but are planning it.
At Comic-Con last summer, Arad was asked if he would consider allowing Spider-Man to appear in an Avengers movie. At the time Arad insisted there were enough Spider-Man stories to keep him separate. Now that The Avengers is such a phenomenon, he is even open to considering making a deal between Sony’s Spidey and Disney’s Avengers. He says he thought of the Venom crossover possibility independently of Avengers though.
“Everything is possible,” Arad said. “If something like that happens, it’s great for Disney, it’s great for Sony. If the right story comes in, we are now working on Venom first. It’s our first out. So our thinking is in the right direction. Avengers to me was an expected success so I never looked at it because Avengers was successful.”
The way to make team up movies work, Arad says, is to create the raw materials, both technically and creatively, in other movies first. “Team ups can happen once you create the character, establish the CG, otherwise it’s not affordable.”
CraveOnline will be back with more Venom news after we clean the space goo out of our ears.
