‘Venom’ co-screenwriter Jeff Pinkner has confirmed that a sequel is on its way. While appearing on the Discussing Film podcast, he confessed “I can’t say anything other than that it is happening,” but when asked whether he was writing it, he replied, “I am not. As of now, I am not.” Now that doesn’t mean that ultimately he won’t end up at least contributing to the script, but that at this point in time, he has not officially signed on the dotted line with Sony.
There are some other questions hovering over the sequel. Reportedly, director Ruben Fleischer and star Tom Hardy did not get along and even clashed on the set. Since recasting isn’t likely to fly with audiences, does that mean Sony will replace Fleischer?
‘Venom’ was the scrappy upstart of the year. It looked like a complete turd in the first trailers, but here we are, a couple of months after it opened and it has racked up an astounding $850 million worldwide and is still doing gangbusters in China, where it opened later than the rest of the world.
The first movie set up a sequel in its post-credits sequence, with the tease of the arrival of Cletus Kasady a.k.a. Carnage, portrayed by Woody Harrelson, who starred in Fleischer’s ‘Zombieland’ and is confirmed for the upcoming sequel.
Any rumored conflicts aside, Fleischer earlier stated that he was looking forward to working with Harrelson again:
“So, when we were thinking about including that scene and laying the groundwork for a potential sequel, he was the first person I thought of and a just because selfishly I’m really excited to work with him again, whether it’s in ‘Zombieland 2’ or the potential sequel to this film. But if you think about ‘Natural Born Killers’ and ‘Mickey’, the character he played in that film, I feel like there’s a real lineage that you can trace from Mickey to Cletus and I also think that he hasn’t gone dark in that way for a while.”
Are you excited that Sony is moving forward with ‘Venom 2’?
