The first teaser for Sony’s Venom is here, and it’s … not much.
The Marvel Comics-based film, starring Tom Hardy as journalist Eddie Brock, has been quite enigmatic throughout its production process, and that secrecy appears to be carrying over into its hype cycle. Exhibit A: The first teaser for a movie titled Venom shows zero footage of Venom himself (unless you count the film’s smoky logo towards the end), the Spider-Man villain/antihero created when Brock is possessed by a malevolent alien Symbiote.
What we do get in the underwhelming clip is some fairly generic action footage, an accented monologue on the transformative power of trauma from Hardy’s Brock—”Everyone’s got their thing. Maybe it’s a break-up, a death, an accident … Whatever it is, you used to be one thing, and now you’re something else”—and quick glimpses of the film’s cast, including Michelle Williams as Brock’s ex-wife Ann Weying, Riz Ahmed as an evil CEO type who appears to possess the Symbiote, and Veep’s Reid Scott as a doctor of some sort. Clearly, Sony is committed to preserving Venom’s mystery, leaving us to wonder what they’re hiding (and hoping it’s a film that lives up to the plentiful badassery that this film’s initial announcement promised).
Ruben Fleischer directed Venom from a script from Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinkner (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), and Kelly Marcel and Will Beall. Judging only by our first look at Venom, it appears as if the tongue-in-cheek humor that defined Fleischer’s breakout film Zombieland will be sorely missed in his latest.
Venom opens on Oct. 5. Watch the first teaser above and revisit the film’s chilling poster here.