Sony Reconfirms Venom Movie for Next October, Pushes Back The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Yesterday, Sony announced that Venom, Spider-Man’s go-to foil since the late ‘80s, is getting his own movie … completely separate from any existing Spider-Man films.

That’s right, Sony Pictures has shifted the also recently-announced The Girl in the Spider’s Web back two weeks to make room for an Oct. 5, 2018 release of a Venom-centric film. How will this story work without the inclusion of Spider-Man? Nobody has any idea. (They wouldn’t create another on-screen Spider-Man just for this, would they?) For the uninitiated, Venom was born after Peter Parker was all too eager to shed his evil, alien symbiote costume, which then found its way to its new host: anger-filled photojournalist Eddie Brock. The two merged to form the hulking creature, which not only retained Spider-Man’s powers, but is immune to the web-head’s spider-sense and can otherwise camouflage itself.

With a script by Scott Rosenberg (Jumanji) and Jeff Pinkner (The Dark Tower), such a Venom-starring movie has actually been in the works for quite some time. If you made it to the end of 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, you might remember that Sony was once rushing to set up a Sinister Six-focused film, one of many pictures in their now-defunct Spider-Man cinematic universe that Venom was meant to be a large part of. While it seems every other part of that planned continuity has been scrapped, the studio apparently feels confident that their Venom script can still stand on its own, even as the launching point for an entire franchise.

Though there are plenty of Spider-Man-less Venom stories out there, we still have no idea what Sony’s plan will be for the film’s plot, or how it’ll work without the wall-crawler as a huge part of the villain/anti-hero’s origin. Be sure to stay tuned to Paste as we wait to see what Sony will do in this corner they’ve backed themselves into.