Today in “News That Is In No Way Surprising But We Have to Feed the Fanboy Beast to Keep the Lights On”, we have some very slight Venom information. Filming recently begun on the upcoming Spider-Man spinoff that probably won’t have Spider-Man, and the film is due out in a little less than a year. Plot details are still scarce on Ruben Fleischer’s superhero movie, which stars Tom Hardy in the lead role alongside Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, and Jenny Slate. In the comics, Venom (at least the first incarnation) was spiteful photographer Eddie Brock, who merged with an alien symbiote that had left Peter Parker once Peter realized it was turning him evil despite making him stronger and giving him unlimited web fluid.

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Image via Warner Bros.

If you’ve never read the comics or seen Spider-Man 3 (where Venom was shoehorned in and didn’t really make the movie better), the symbiote completely transforms the host, giving him fangs, a long tongue, and making him drool a lot. So it should come as no surprise that Andy Serkis revealed in an interview to Yahoo! that Hardy will be using motion-capture for the role:

“Acting is acting, and the more actors – like Steve Zahn… and Karin Konoval who plays Maurice in ‘War For The Planet of the Apes’ – the more A-list actors that come on board, like Mark Rylance playing The BFG, or a lot of actors in the new Marvel films… Tom Hardy is playing a new character using performance capture. It all points up ‘what is the nature of acting?’ and there is no difference between acting wearing a costume and make up, or wearing a motion capture suit. That’s plain and simple, it just needs awarding bodies to understand that.”

While it’s not a surprise that Hardy will be using mo-cap for his performance, I’m still curious to see how he uses it and how much information he’s able to convey. Hardy’s an actor that likes using every tool in the toolbox, pushing himself further with dialects and restrictions. He’s played two characters that had their face primarily covered, and in Locke he was stuck behind the wheel of a car. Although I’m not particularly interested in Venom as a movie, I’m certainly intrigued to see how Hardy takes on mo-cap technology.

Venom opens October 5, 2018.

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Image via Marvel Comics

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