Where to watch Venom (2018)

Trivia & production notes

• David S. Goyer wrote a Venom screenplay for New Line Cinema in 1997 with Dolph Lundgren attached to star and Carnage as the villain, but the project never materialized.
• Topher Grace's role as Eddie Brock in Spider-Man 3 was expanded from a brief appearance to a major villain role because producer Avi Arad wanted to feature characters that modern fans cared about rather than just director Sam Raimi's personal favorites.
• An early Venom script by Jacob Estes imagined the character trying to reinvent himself as a hero with help from a waitress, and was written with Topher Grace returning to the role.
• A 2009 draft of Venom included a sequence where the symbiote would jump from body to body through a city, with each person it inhabited becoming violent and attacking someone else before it moved on.
• Josh Trank and Robert Siegel pitched an R-rated Venom film styled after The Mask, but producer Matt Tolmach rejected their treatment.
• The Venom film was initially planned to arrive after The Amazing Spider-Man 3 but before The Amazing Spider-Man 4, but those timelines shifted following The Amazing Spider-Man 2's underperformance.
• Tom Hardy became interested in the Venom role partly because his young son was a fan of the character.
• Ruben Fleischer was selected as Venom's director after a lengthy search by Sony, having expressed enthusiasm about the visual possibilities and thematic ideas like duality that the character offered.
• David F. Sandberg met with Sony to discuss directing Venom but ultimately chose to make DC's Shazam! instead because he had previously worked with members of that film's crew at New Line Cinema.
• Tom Hardy trained in mixed martial arts, boxing, and jiu-jitsu for five weeks to prepare for the Venom role, and was paid $7 million for the part.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Venom (2018 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.