Sony has had a hard time as of late making comic book movies. It had to turn to Marvel to reboot the Spider-Man franchise after its own Amazing Spider-Man movies fizzled out. Since Spider-Man has returned to prominence, Sony is attempting to branch out with more movies starting with Venom, but its approach doesn’t sound like what fans were hoping for.
According to Variety, the new Tom Hardy Venom won’t be too faithful to the dark theme of the comic books and will instead take a lighter approach resulting in a PG-13 rating. When news of the Venom movie first came out, fans were hoping Sony would take a similar approach to what Fox took with Deadpool and Logan’s R-rating and let Venom’s dark and bloody tendencies loose.
That appeared to be the case in the first two trailers for the movie, especially the second one where Venom crassly talks about a poop metaphor and seemingly bites the face off a criminal. But that apparently was all show as Sony is playing it safe with Venom and is trying keep it more family friendly with a PG-13 rating.
The report states Sony wants to include Venom in a movie with Spider-Man in the future, but if Venom’s take is truly dark with an R-rating, that will be a lot harder to do since Spider-Man has always been more family friendly.
The news coming out of Sony is quite unfortunate. It seemed as though studios had reached a new point with the massive success of R-rated comic book movies, but if Sony’s stance is any indication, they’re still morbidly afraid of closing off possible audiences to a movie that carries a substantial budget.
At the very least, Warner Bros. seems to be willing to give its upcoming Joker movie an R-rating to let it reach its full potential. Though reports state Sony is not willing to do so with Venom, it could still change its mind between now and the movie’s release date on October 5.
