Hardy to play Venom in Marvel spin-off
LOS ANGELES: He played a formidable villain for DC Comics, and now he’ll do the same for Marvel: Tom Hardy has signed on to lead Venom ,a spin-off movie in Marvel’s expanding universe.
Hardy will play Eddie Brock, a vengeful reporter who fuses with a powerful alien parasite to become Venom. The character was previously played by Topher Grace in the 2007 film Spider-Man 3 as one of the webslinger’s main antagonists.
Venom, a Sony production, is projected for release on Oct 5 next year. Ruben Fleischer
(Zombieland) will direct. Venom was introduced in 1988 and has floated through the Marvel Universe, appearing alongside not just Spider-Man, but also Iron Man, Deadpool and the Hulk. He’s the latest in an extensive and growing web of Marvel characters on screen. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man first showed up in last year’s Captain
America: Civil War, and he’ll soon be seen in his own movie, Spider-Man: Homecoming, arriving later this year.
Reports indicate that Sony’s
Spider-Man series, which also may include films centred on the characters Silver Sable and Black Cat, will be largely unconnected to the Avengers movies. It’s unclear whether SpiderMan will appear in Venom at all.
For Hardy, this is his latest opportunity to break bad and distort his face.
He played Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, starred in Mad
Max: Fury Road and was nominated for an Oscar for his villainous turn in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. NYT