Venom To Be PG:13? - Movie News Nuggets

Welcome to the Steemit's first Movie News Nugget. Delivering little bite size, easy digestible, chunks of movie news for you to nibble on. I spend a ton of time following what's going on in the world of film, particularly comic book movies. But I will, however, try and serve up a variety of nuggets for you to enjoy! Here goes......

Anyone remember Deadpool? It took $783 million worldwide on an estimated $58 million budget. Proof that R rated movies can't make money?

Of course there's more to this. Lets reverse a bit. Since the announcement of Sony's Venom speculation has been rife that the Spidey villian's solo adventure would carry an R rating due to the nature of the character. In Fact the film's director Ruben Fleischer said this at San Diego ComicCon.

"Our movie wants to honor the comics as close as we can tonally. In the comics, he bites people's heads off and eats brains. It would be weird to make a movie with Venom if he wasn't doing that. We tried to honor it as closely as possible. This is definitely a darker, more violent, more vicious Marvel character than I think anyone's ever seen before."

But today Variety are reporting that an R rating is "unlikely". So what's going on?

This is speculation (Movie News Nuggets and Speculation just doesn't have the same ring to it), but in my humble geeky opinion this is to do with Sony wanting to play with with Disney's toys. And The Mouse just bought a whole bunch more now that they are about to merge with Fox, bringing a huge number of characters - including the Fantastic Four and X-Men - over to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). And of course swinging around said universe is one friendly neighbourhood Spiderman, a character who's movies are going to be PG-13 for the foreseeable future. If Sony wants to somehow mash Venom into the MCU they need it to be financially and critically successful, but I imagine that many Sony executives will also want to play it safe and keep Venom on the same rating level.

Personally I think this is a mistake. Just make a bloody Venom movie. Guess what Sony, if your Venom movie sucks it's not going to be going anywhere but where Universal's "Dark Universe" ended up. Gone. The big studios' obsession with building giant Marvel style cinematic universes is understandable. Marvel are a huge success, but in their short-sightedness they are missing one important fact. The MCU wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Iron Man (2008) . A great, stand alone (with little Avengers tag post credits) movie. Then they built on that, and without it they would not be where they are today.

The Sony Spider-Strategy is mind boggling. They've got Enter The Spiderverse coming out as an animated cinematic release, they just scrapped the Silver and Black live action film, but are still making a Black Cat movie, and are doing a Morbius film with Jared Leto. It's unclear what ties together with what, and there is no official line on whether they intend to tie these movies in to the MCU like their current Spiderman movies do.

If they're not careful there universe will end up as messy as Superman's face in Justice League.

I want them to succeed. The more great comic book movies from a variety of studios the better. But letting the fact that you want to tie to the MCU alter your creative choices for one of the best characters you own the rights to is a bad decision. And one final thing, if it was a smash hit R who says they can't have Venom in the MCU? Jessica Jones and Daredevil are, and they are certainly not kid friendly viewing.

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