Venom's Sequel Has Its Director

Serkis

(THR) “Andy Serkis is officially stepping into Venom’s goo.

The filmmaker has closed a deal to direct Venom 2, Sony’s sequel to the 2018 film that grossed $856 million at the global box office. The sequel, part of the company’s stable of Spider-Man related and Marvel-centric characters, will once again star Tom Hardy as the journalist who joins with an alien symbiote.”

I was extremely, EXTREMELY tentative going into ‘Venom‘, and ended up liking it a fair amount more than I expected. It was still very clunky from a script standpoint, but it nailed a lot of funny lines that I didn’t think were possible based off the trailers. The big post-credit moment from that movie was introducing Carnage (played by Woody Harrelson) as the villain for the sequel, which excited both me and venom stans everywhere.

I find Andy Serkis to be an interesting choice as director. Most people know him as Gollum from the Lord of the Rings franchise, or Klaue from ‘Black Panther’. He’s the MoCap guy, and is credit as being one of the foremost pioneers in that field. As far as directing credits go, he was a second unit director on the Hobbit trilogy (meh) and was the primary director on ‘Breathe’ which wasn’t bad, and ‘Mowgli’, which was awful. With the latter, he tried to do something highly experimental with facial recognition and it just didn’t pan out, so I don’t totally blame him for that, but still. I don’t know if he’s the right choice, but I guess we will find out. Hopefully he can capture some of the same humor the original director, Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland), did and doesn’t take it in too serious of a route.