I dunno, folks.
The very last bit suggests that it could be screwed up enough to be good. I mean, they got Deadpool to work, right? And, believe me: Venom wouldn’t have gotten greenlit if Deadpool hadn’t somehow figured out how to work.
Guess we’ll see.
Major ask.
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Would *someone* explain how Venom ever worked?
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I mean .. I get comic books can get strange .. and sometimes strange can get wonderful (see Squirrel Girl) but .. Venom? Never made sense ..
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Mew
It probably helped that Todd McFarlane was first artist to make use of him (his initial appearance – as an anonymous hand that pushed Peter Parker onto a subway track without triggering Peter’s Spider-Sense – was drawn by someone else, though). Also, it was the ’90s. And Venom was an unusual fit for the anti-hero thing going on at the time.
It’s also possible that Venom still wouldn’t have caught on if it weren’t for the absolutely awful (in every sense of the word, imo) Carnage, who made Venom look downright wholesome in comparison.
Also worth noting that Carnage is pretty much the point at which comic book “Do Not Kill” codes just get plain silly. He’s well-nigh indestructible (iirc, he’s even missing one of the Venom symbiote’s two well-known weaknesses). And he’s a mass-murderer who kills more or less just because. That’s his entire schtick. If there’s ever a guy in Marvel Comics who *needed* to be executed, it’s Carnage.
Okay, so .. Venom is a fairly stupid idea .. but will become a movie because it’s far from the worst stupid idea?
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As for the “no killing” thing .. I get why Superman has that as a mantra. (no, it’s not “because he’s a boy scout”, it’s because the individual power differential may be significant, but not insurmountable .. and killing Lex Luthor would render Superman a potential threat .. and humans are collectively very good at eliminating potential threats.)
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So .. I’ll just chalk Venom up as “something stupid to ignore”.
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Mew
The original idea behind Venom was fine. He was the synthesis of a human who hated Spider-Man and the symbiote costume which had been rejected by Spider-Man. They combined to make a very powerful enemy for Spider-Man.
The problem was that aside from his hatred of Spider-Man and general mental instability (the instability was the result of his merger with the symbiote, which tended to subconsciously influence his thinking in the comic books), he wasn’t a bad guy. In fact, if presented with a situation in which innocents were endangered, he could set aside his hatred of Spider-Man long enough to actually work with Spider-Man to overcome a mutual antagonist (Carnage being a big case in point; he’s the result of the Venom symbiote’s “child” linking up with a serial killer). And then Venom quickly became a popular Spider-Man villain, which meant that he got fleshed out a bit, and then got his own comic book in which Spider-Man never appeared. And that meant that Eddie could go stop criminals in his own horrifying and violent anti-hero fashion (remember that this was in the ’90s) without the distraction of plotting 24/7 how to get revenge on Spider-Man.
So, that leaves us with the Venom movie. And the new Venom. Spider-Man doesn’t appear to be in the movie in any way, shape, or form. So it’s unlikely that Eddie has his comic book hatred of the web-slinger. And the symbiote has almost certainly never met Peter Parker. So it doesn’t have the love-hate attraction that it does in the comic book. That gets rid of the “I hate Spider-Man” angle. And what we have left is the mentally unstable anti-hero who’s trying to do the right thing while merged with a horrifying symbiote that sees people as just another form of protein (particularly their brains).
It could be good. More likely it’ll be bad. We’ll have to wait and see.