Venom Trailer Breakdown: 27 Secrets You Missed
Venom‘s full trailer has been released, and as well as finally giving us a proper look at Tom Hardy in symbiote mode, it’s revealed an awful lot about the plot of Sony’s Spider-Man villain spinoff.
The first in what the studio hopes to be a full-on shared universe, there’s been a lot of mystery and confusion over what exactly Venom is: what is Tom Hardy bringing? Is it in the MCU? How do you make a movie about a villain? The first teaser trailer thus got a rather mixed response from fans given its complete lack of Venom, but also the overall monotone stylings. The same can not be said about the new trailer, which promises a movie fitting of Hardy’s talents.
Obviously, we actually get to see Venom in the shifting flesh, but that’s just the tip of the meteorite. Join us as we break down everything seen, confirmed and teased in the new Venom trailer.
27. The Crash
We open with what was a key focus of the teaser and an essential part of any Venom story: the arrival of the symbiote on Earth. In the movie, it appears to come as part of a bigger crash, with the goo extracted from the wreckage. As for what exactly it’s come from, that’s hard to make out. It appears to be man-made, so could be a spaceship that somehow picked up the symbiote (a la the animated Spider-Man series), although this could be an early sign of the movie taking a leaf out of the Ultimate comics and it actually being a terrestrial product.
26. Life Foundation Claims The Symbiote
Wherever it comes from (something that may be a mystery in Venom itself), the symbiote is taken away from the crash in canisters (again, it’s unclear if that’s how they’re found or if they’re containing it) by the Life Foundation. A Spider-Man villain group, Life had many schemes but one of their most famous is manipulation of symbiotes, which we’re likely to see here.
In the trailer, the collection is overplayed with the Foundation’s head, Carlton Drake, saying, “Thank you for bringing us collectively to this moment. It is a moment that so many have dreamed of claiming. History starts today.” It’s trailer editing, so we must be careful to read too much into the dialogue’s placement, and indeed this keeps it vague as to what their prior connection to the symbiote is, although the stealing of it suggests piggy-backing experiments.
25. In Association With Marvel
Venom, of course, originates from the pages of Marvel Comics, and so the movie has that logo; but it’s not a Marvel Studios production. Instead – and in a seeming first – it says “In Association With Marvel“, clearly distinguishing it from the creative side of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That doesn’t say anything explicit about any potential narrative connections, but it does show the House of Ideas making clearer distinctions over what’s theirs.
24. Anne Weying
Although we’re introduced to Eddie Brock via voiceover, the character we’re first properly acquainted with is actually Anne Weying, played in Venom by Michelle Williams. In the source, Weying is most well-known for becoming She-Venom, but that’s been suggested to not be the case here – at least in the first movie. Instead, it looks like Williams is playing a more standard love interest to Eddie, with her connections to the Life Foundation – she works for a firm that works for them – serving as an entry point to the story. She’s the normality, the good side of Eddie (which really only makes She-Venom in a sequel more desirable, especially if it’s pitched alongside Carnage).
23. Eddie Brock: Reporter
Unlike the previous big-screen version of Eddie Brock from Spider-Man 3, Tom Hardy’s take on the character is actually a reporter as in the comics (Topher Grace’s was a photographer). This faithful element was key to initial intrigue in the project, and in the new trailer we get a sense of Brock’s probing interview style. Anne warns him the night before interviewing Drake to not get himself in trouble, but he doesn’t seem to listen, jumping right into unwanted questions. In Eddie’s own words, “I follow people who do not want to be followed.” Reporting on college football games, he is not.
22. San Francisco
Although being a Spider-Man villain tends to have Venom associated with New York City, that’s not where the movie’s Eddie Brock resides. Both trailers have made a point of being set in San Francisco, with The City by the Bay forming a key backdrop. This may challenge those unfamiliar with Eddie, but it fits the comics nicely; he grew in SF and returned there after being infected by Venom, where he first ran in with the Life Foundation. That was part of the Lethal Protector arc, which we’re getting some form of adaptation of here.
21. Carlton Drake
And so we get to Riz Ahmed as Carlton Drake, head of the Life Foundation. Although visually a little different from the comics – print Drake is much more typical 1980s evil businessman compared to Ahmed’s trim getup – from what we see of him in the trailer he too looks to be a pretty close take, if updated with the times.
20. Life’s Dark Secrets
In his interview with Drake, Eddie asks about Life’s evidently well-rumored misdeeds: “you recruit the most vulnerable for tests that end up killing people“. There’s plenty of comic-based crimes that could apply to, but quite obviously Eddie is talking about the experiments with the symbiotes on unsuspecting “volunteers“. Clearly, Drake doesn’t like being asked those sorts of questions and he’s taken away – although that isn’t the end of Brock at Life.
19. Eddie Is Hunted
After the interview, the trailer shows Eddie seemingly paranoid about being followed before confronting his tracker – who just so happens to work for the Life Foundation. While this is framed as coming after his interview, narratively it might better fit before; he’s approached by an inside source with information on the symbiote experiments, which then leads him to setting up an interview that goes less than swimmingly.
18. Symbiotes Are Evolution
And about those tests… According to Brock’s source, “Drake believes that the union between human and symbiote is the key to our evolution.” Everything going on at Life is thus an attempt to tap into that presumed power, with Drake killing test subjects in repeated attempts to prove his theory. This may be the origins of the Five Symbiotes, which we’ll get to in a moment, but what it also…
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