Last week it was reported that the popular Spider-Man villain Venom might be getting his own solo movie. That was confirmed today when Sony announced an October 5, 2018, release date for the project, according to Variety. Alien: Covenant’s Dante Harper will write the script, but no director is attached to the picture at this time. Back in 2014, when Amy Pascal was the co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, she told Variety, “We are expanding the Spider-Man universe into the Sinister Six and Venom, so that we have Spider-Man movies every year.” Pascal stepped down from her post after the massive email-hacking scandal at Sony, but with the latest Spidey reboot arriving later this year, Spider-Man: Homecoming, and Venom now booked for a fall 2018 premiere, that puts the studio on track for annual web-slinger-centric releases.
As per Vulture’s previous write-up, here is a quick explainer on the new solo movie star: “The character was introduced in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1988, the brainchild of comics creators Randy Schueller, David Michelinie, Mike Zeck, and Todd McFarlane. Venom’s shtick is a little complicated: There’s a black-and-white alien entity that wraps itself around a human host and exists in symbiosis with it. When someone is possessed by the symbiote, they often go by the moniker ‘Venom’ and usually either do bad things or at least violent ones. Venom has often been a villain, but has also been a sort of anti-hero, a moral alignment that would make a fair amount of sense for a big-screen starring role.”
