In news that comes as not at all that surprising, it has recently been leaked that Tom Hardy’s role in ‘Venom’ will be relying heavily on motion-capture, which makes a lot of sense when you considering the shape-shifting potential of the alien symbiote costume that the character wears. What is surprising is the source of the news, as it comes to us from the maverick of motion-capture himself, Andy Serkis, while discussing a different movie entirely.

According to Andy Serkis during a recent conversation with Yahoo while discussing his directorial debut ‘Breathe:’

“Acting is acting, and the more actors – like Steve Zahn… and Karin Konoval who plays Maurice in ‘War For The Planet of the Apes’ – the more A-list actors that come on board, like Mark Rylance playing The BFG, or a lot of actors in the new Marvel films… Tom Hardy is playing a new character using performance capture. It all points up ‘what is the nature of acting?’ and there is no difference between acting wearing a costume and make up, or wearing a motion capture suit. That’s plain and simple, it just needs awarding bodies to understand that.”

What Serkis’s involvement with ‘Venom’ will be is any0ne’s guess, though his mo-cap company, the Imaginarium, is highly regarded in Hollywood these days and has been used in Marvel films before (i.e. for the Hulk in ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’) so he and/or his company could be brought in as a consultant for ‘Venom’ to get the work just right. Regardless, it does seem the best way to handle the character, and if anyone is up for the task of bringing ‘Venom’ to life through motion-capture technology, it would be Tom Hardy. If he could bring Bane to life while wearing a cumbersome mask, or make his character in ‘Dunkirk’ engaging in a handful of minutes while buried under the flight mask, he should have no problem coming up with a nuanced performance that the mo-cap engineers can transfer to a computer generated character in the same way they have done in the past for Serkis.

What are your thoughts on ‘Venom’ relying on motion-capture technology? Are you worried that the CGI look might take too much away from the film? Share your opinions in the comments below!