As we’ve seen from set photos of the cast of Marvel’s movies, many of the actors including Robert Downey Jr., Tom Holland, and Mark Ruffalo wear motion capture suits, which capture their movements on the set, then allow animators to add their costumes via CGI in post-production. This type of filmmaking has been around for many years, with Andy Serkis mastering it in movies like ‘King Kong’, the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, the ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies and ‘Tin-Tin’ among others.
According to Tom Hardy, ‘Venom’ does NOT employ motion capture. Apparently, the idea of him donning one of the high tech suits to deliver a physical performance as the symbiotic anti-hero was nixed from the start.
As he stated in an interview with Total Film Magazine (via Screen Rant):
“It wasn’t motion-capture, because the eyeballs on the creature, on Venom, and the mouth, they don’t match with my eyeballs and mouth. So the mo-cap treatment went out of the window pretty quickly… Facially, your eyes and teeth and tongue are not going to match with this. And you need a 7ft tall basketball player in a Lycra suit for the physical shots.”
What does this mean for the movie? Well, from the way that Hardy described the process, it seems as though Venom is close to 100% CGI. That means his costars were forced to act opposite nothing. Typically in such scenarios, the crew positions an object, usually a tennis ball, or marks the floor or walls with an X to indicate where someone or something is supposed to be and actors react accordingly.
Hardy is simply playing Eddie Brock and providing the voice of Venom. Otherwise, Venom is kind of like a deadly, high tech version of Roger Rabbit.
How do you feel about that? Does it matter that Venom is all post-production?
‘Venom’ opens in theaters on October 5, 2018.