‘Venom’ Movie Talks: ‘Deadpool’ Writers Dish On Film That Was Not Meant To Be

A Venom movie based on Marvel Comics’ villainous character has been talked about for years but never produced following the black-and-white one’s one-time appearance on film in Spider-Man 3.

Now, in comments to Collider, the guys, who wrote the script, have shed some light on what the film could have been had it ever come to pass.

Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, the team behind Zombieland and the Deadpool standalone stuck in development, said their Venom movie would have been “realistic, grounded, and a little more dark take on the character.”

That admission came from Reese, with Wernick adding, “Yeah, it was definitely kind of dark and soul search-y. We love it, and we’re proud of it.”

While the character’s appearance in Spider-Man 3 was hardly well-received by critics, worldwide audiences made the third entry the most financially lucrative of the series, raking in $890 million.

International audiences responded better to Topher Grace in the role than Americans, however, who turned out in smaller numbers than they had for Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, according to Box Office Mojo.

Describing the pitch the team made to Sony, Wernick said, “Imagine a symbiote traveling across a city at some point in the movie, jumping from body to body as it goes, and each person that it inhabits ends up becoming really violent and striking someone else and then it jumps to the next person. There was a really cool sequence like that in there.”

(Denzel Washington starred in an entire film based on that premise. Fallen, anyone?)

But Wernick did say it was just a sequence. As to who the main character would have been: “Eddie Brock was a conflicted character, and so I don’t think it could have been Peter Parker,” Reese said.

One person, who wasn’t keen on the idea of the character headlining a film was co-creator Todd McFarlane, who in 2008 shared his thoughts with Newsarama.

Doubting the anti-hero as headliner theory, McFarlane said, “Those don’t work. The reason they’re so cool as a bad guy is because they’re bad. And as soon as you try to give too much humanity to them, then you go, no! Now they’re not as good as a bad guy because you’re trying to redeem them.”

As for that Deadpool script, Reese and Wernick told Collider they weren’t happy when they found their work had been leaked online, but noted that “the Deadpool fans who found it think that it’s right in the wheelhouse of what a Deadpool movie should be.

Everyone from Ryan Reynolds, who has signed on to play the character in what would be a “hard R-rated” superhero film, to Stan Lee would like to see it happen.

What about you? Are you game for a Deadpool film, and would you like to see a Venom movie or would it be too hard to make the bad guy the main character of a film?

[Image via still from Spider-Man 3]

http://youtu.be/1bzqHbTD64w