If you’re a regular reader of this site, you may have noticed that we were a bit… underwhelmed by last week’s ‘Venom’ trailer. It’s a sentiment shared by many on the internet, including comics pros like Deadpool co-creator Rob Liefeld, who described the trailer as “not ready for prime time.” And now we can add one more name to the list of the unimpressed: Kevin Smith.
On a recent installment of the Smith’s ‘Hollywood Babble-On’ podcast, the director, along with co-host Ralph Garman, discussed the recently released trailers for ‘Avengers: Infinity War‘ and ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story‘ before turning their attention toward ‘Venom’. Suffice to say, Smith was less than impressed, quipping that “I didn’t see a ‘Venom’ trailer. I saw ‘Tom Hardy: The Movie’.”
That’s been perhaps the most common criticism of the trailer, that in addition to looking incredibly generic (if you didn’t know any better, you’d might easily think it was advertising a remake of ‘Outbreak’ rather than a superhero film), it also doesn’t offer so much as a fleeting glimpse of its title character. The counterargument is that (on the one hand) given the film’s allegedly rushed production and the still very recent completion of principal photography, the necessary CGI work may not yet have been completed and (on the other hand) this is arguably more of a teaser and Sony is likely building to a big reveal of Venom in a later trailer. Regardless, Smith isn’t buying it. Though he acknowledges that it’s a teaser (and thus designed to do exactly that), the filmmaker adds that “you can’t call the movie ‘Venom’ and not show Venom.”
Be sure to check back with ScienceFiction.com for more on ‘Venom’ as it becomes available!
Directed by Ruben Fleischer, ‘Venom’ stars Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze, and Reid Scott. The long awaited ‘Spider-Man’ spinoff is set to arrive in theaters on October 5, 2018.
