In spite of getting poor early reactions and reviews (our movies editor Brian Lloyd referred to it as ‘bland’ and ‘one of the weakest superhero movies in quite some time’), ‘Venom’ has been doing just fine at the box office, raking in over $205 million worldwide since its release last week.
The movie went through numerous edits before the final version was released – according to Tom Hardy, his favourite 40 mins were cut from the film – and now director Ruben Fleischer has revealed the opening scene was also reworked.
Anyone who has seen the movie – and this isn’t really spoiler-y given this is all shown within the first few minutes of ‘Venom’ – will know the first scene depicts a spaceship coming under attack by something mysterious and crashing to earth, with the deadly cargo in tow.
Fleischer told CinemaBlend: “The beginning of the movie was a hard one. Like, how much do we want to tell the backstory?
“There was a version [of the opening] where there was a planet crawling with tons of symbiotes that were collected and taken back to Earth by the Life Foundation. They had encountered them. But it kind of felt like, my instinct was it would be better to keep it more mysterious and just know that they've retrieved something from space. We don't know exactly by what means or how.
“Jenny [Slate]'s character later says they encountered it on a comet that was passing, and they retrieved these samples and brought it back to Earth. But yeah, I thought it was better just leave it a little bit mysterious, the backstory of the aliens.”
The artificial planet of the symbiotes is called Klyntar and it was created to imprison their leader, Knull. While it would have been a tad complicated to delve into, it might have been more interesting than the rather generic opening we ended up with.
Producer Matt Tolmach said they “toyed with some artwork” but ultimately decided “it made sense to, in this movie, to let the origin of those things kind of unravel in the storytelling is as opposed to going [to that planet].”
