Many previous articles have talked about the ludicrous elements that are present in the character of Venom. After all, when you’ve got a man possessed by a goo-like substance from outer space and have him battle a man bitten by a radioactive spider, the material will have to be outlandish in some shape or form.
However, of all the villains in Spider-Man’s rogue gallery, Venom has to be at the top in terms of popularity. The symbiote hasn’t inflicted tragedies to Peter Parker such as Green Goblin; who took the life of Gwen Stacy, or Doctor Octopus; who stole Parker’s body. But Venom has been a close enemy of Spidey due to the influence the symbiote had on Peter. The coolness factor attached to Venom has meant fans have taken to this character the most.
Spider-Man 3 shoehorned Venom in at the last minute to ensure tickets would be sold, and boy did they ever sell. The film became the highest-grossing superhero movie of all-time. After this success, plans began for a Venom solo film.
The film finally released in 2018 to mediocre reviews although fan reception was positive. It did fix a few glaring faults from Spider-Man 3 like removing the nagging habit Eddie had of revealing his face every time he had something to say. Venom finally has a live-action iteration of the character that shows us his signature snarl.
However, the movie has many faults of its own, lending credibility to the negative reviews it has received. Here are 25 of those you may have missed, and even if you didn’t, they don’t make sense either way.
25 What Happens To Guys Venom Eats?
In Spider-Man 3, Venom hardly ever opened his mouth to reveal his signature long tongue, although it was implied he wanted to feast on his opponents. In Venom, the character made true to this assumption and devoured his victims whole.
So where do they go?
The symbiote doesn’t have a body of its own for the victim to be stored in. For that matter, how does the mouth form anyway? Eddie’s face is behind the tongue. In any case, whenever Venom was shown to be devouring people, the camera cut away before showing the person being consumed. So do they simply vanish?
24 Does Eddie Eat The Victims Too?
To elaborate further on the earlier point, Eddie’s face is supposed to be behind Venom’s snarl. In the final scene of the movie, Venom-along with Eddie-swallowed the burglar in the store whole. After finishing up on this nice treat, Venom rescinds to give Eddie control of the body again. When Eddie comes to, he can be seen smacking his lips as if having enjoyed a sumptuous meal.
Does this mean Eddie ate the guy? It doesn’t make much sense seeing that for him to have consumed the burglar he’d have to be twice larger in size, but where else could the burglar’s body have gone?
23 Why Does Venom Resemble Spider-Man?
In Spider-Man 3, Venom took on a form similar to Spider-Man-along with similar powers like web shooting-thanks to him having taken control of Peter Parker for a number of weeks. This had granted him access to Peter’s physiology and molded himself according to the Spider-Man suit.
But Venom never met Spider-Man in the movie.
He simply took on the Venom form we’re used to right from the get-go. Then why does he resemble Spidey when he never came across Peter Parker in this continuity? It’s most likely in this universe the image of Venom is simply the default appearance of the symbiote.
22 Why Is Drake Obsessed With Symbiotes?
Carlton Drake turns out to be one of those Knight Templar type villains who ultimately has good intentions but takes drastic measures, effectively turning him into a bad guy. His motive is to preserve humanity once climate change ravages the world.
But why is he obsessed with symbiotes to this degree? The planet isn’t scorched just yet and won’t be for the foreseeable future; so what’s the deal with his obvious obsession with these space creatures? Why not go back to the drawing board and start over? In the end, he’s just a weird guy taking up tropes that have been seen in other villains before him such as, dare we say, Doctor Doom in Fantastic Four.
21 What Is Up With The Pronunciation?
This gripe became such a big deal that the filmmakers had to alter the final cut to “correct” the “mistake.” Actress Jenny Slate’s character caused a ruckus on social media when she pronounced symbiote as “sim-by-ote,” which had never been used in Marvel media before.
Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Spider-Man 3 both had the pronunciation of “sim-bee-ote” instead. Everyone was used to pronouncing the word using this manner and Jenny Slate’s “mispronunciation” made a big deal out of nothing. Although it did end up changing in the theatrical release, the question is why the “sim-by-ote” pronunciation had ever been filmed in the first place?
20 Why Is Venom Offended?
The final scene of the film had Eddie and Venom arguing like an old married couple over the former’s term of endearment for the latter. After finishing off the burglar in the store, Eddie casually tells Mrs. Chen that he has a parasite in his body that made him eat another person.
The symbiote didn’t like being called this.
Once Eddie had exited the store, he and Venom engaged in some back and forth smack talk where the latter was aggressively offended for being called a parasite. What was there to be offended by, though? Venom actually is a parasite feeding off of Eddie, and why should it even matter if he did get called that?
19 How Did It Become Nighttime?
In the very same scene where Eddie and Venom argued for calling the latter a parasite, the outside changed ridiculously soon compared to how it had been only two minutes before. Before encountering the burglar, Eddie had entered the store when it had still been daylight. The confrontation at the store literally took place in real-time.
Eddie walked in, checked out what he wanted to purchase, Venom threatened the burglar, ate him up, and then they both left. All this happened within a couple minutes but what happened once they exited the store? It was a dark street. Somehow, in just two minutes, the time passed in the equivalent of two hours.
18 Talking About Eating
For a being that talks about eating people all the time, Venom sure doesn’t seem to be doing much eating. The symbiote repeatedly threatened Eddie with devouring his organs slowly, and his main motive to become a “hero” was to have victims to munch on as seen in the final scene.
But that’s just about as much he was shown to eat. The film hardly showed us a bloodthirsty Venom who had nothing but food on his mind. For all his talk about eating people, he’s not very interested in going through with the consuming victims part.
17 Drake Has No Security Cameras
Venom latches on to Eddie due to Brock being guided over to the Life Foundation by Jenny Slate’s character. Here, the symbiote stows away on Eddie and makes his escape from the lab. After Carlton Drake becomes knowledgeable of the fact that his prized symbiote is gone, he throws up a storm and demands to know where it fled to.
A simple camera would’ve fixed all problems.
The film means to tell us that a guy with the power and influence of Drake couldn’t fork over a bit of extra cash to invest in a couple of security cameras? That’s not the best point to stop splurging on alien creatures that could spell doom for humanity.
16 Where’s Spider-Man?
As mentioned before, Spider-Man never made an appearance in this film; although that didn’t stop Venom from taking on his likeness. Sony executives have claimed Venom is set in the Sony Marvel Universe, meaning all of the IPs Sony controls of Marvel take place in the same universe.
This would mean the MCU Spider-Man exists here, too.
Sony has said that Venom takes place “adjunct” to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They have plans to integrate Spider-Man along with the Venom continuity soon. All this would indicate that Spider-Man does exist during Venom’s events. Then how come no one commented on Venom looking eerily similar to our friendly neighborhood Spidey?
15 The Accent
Carlton Drake was supposed to be this smooth, suave businessman. And what better way to stamp this in for US audiences than have his roots trace back to England? For the US market, anyone from Europe can easily be considered as belonging to a higher class simply because they have a different accent.
But wait, Drake didn’t have a separate accent at all. He sounded very western-which is funny considering Riz Ahmed actually is British-then why have him be from England at all? If his parents were English, that means he is too and should be speaking with an English accent.
14 How Does Drake Have A Rocket On Standby?
When riot bonds with Drake (they’re best buddies by this point) after he finishes the six-month journey to San Francisco, they plan on collecting further samples from the symbiote’s home planet. As soon as this plan comes into fruition we see Drake beginning plans of starting the probe launch.
This would be silly if we didn’t see the plan being implemented within seconds.
We’ve seen wackiest of things in science fiction and fantasy, but the idea that a space probe would be ready at the blink of an eye to fulfill the wishes of a space goo is really stretching things.
13 Why Does The Symbiote Cherrypick Victims?
When Michelle Williams’ character is possessed-for lack of a better word-by Venom she is used by the symbiote to transport them to Eddie’s location. Once that is done, the two (or three?) of them lock lips for quite a long time before the symbiote latches onto Eddie again.
Eddie’s girlfriend displays no ill-effects from hosting the symbiote. When Eddie’s the person being controlled, the symbiote tells him he’s going to leech off of his body, but why is his girlfriend exempt from this? She walks away just as dandy as she was before the symbiote took control and is completely okay when the film ends.
12 Too Obvious And Cheesy
Everyone was waiting for an appearance from Carnage as soon as Venom was announced to be in the works. Carnage is second in terms of popularity to Venom but is seen as more of a threat given Cletus Cassidy’s status as a lunatic who takes lives. People were delightfully surprised to find out that Woody Harrelson was going to play the part after checking out the end-credit scene.
It could still have been done better as the dialogue was painfully on the nose. We know he’s Carnage when we’re introduced to him, but the fact he added “there will be carnage” is too cheesy to sound cool. Plus, what was up with that wig on his head?
11 What Was Point Of The Post-Credit Scene?
The Carnage scene wasn’t the only post-credit clip we got from Venom. If you stuck around long enough, you would’ve been treated to a trailer for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, due out later. This would be exciting to viewers had it not been completely irrelevant.
This was simply advertising.
Post-credit scenes were popularized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe as they offered moviegoers an extra incentive to stick around after credits had rolled. However, this time it was a blatant marketing ploy as the trailer had nothing to do with the film. It could just as easily have been released on the internet, but Sony obviously wanted to cash in on free advertising by attaching it with Venom.
10 What Happened To Yellow Symbiote?
There were four different kinds of symbiotes shown in the movie; Venom was the black one, Riot was silver, and the blue one went down with Dr. Dora. But we never found out what happened to the yellow one.
Perhaps there are plans to integrate this missing link in future films, although it’s highly unlikely the yellow symbiote will be the focal point of a sequel considering the revelation of Cletus Cassidy in the post-credits scene of Venom. With Carnage set to take center stage as the villain of the sequel, the yellow symbiote might appear as a supporting character in the future.
9 The Wind Line
In this day and age, you can popularize yourself more easily through cringe-worthy material rather than quality content. Ridiculous stuff gets more famous due to its “so-bad-it’s-good” factor. Just check out the popularity of The Room to know what we’re talking about.
Venom didn’t go the horror-centric route it had originally gone with the teaser trailer. Instead, marketing focused on how ridiculous a lot of the film’s elements were. The final cut also had a lot of comedic elements that made Venom out to look like a man-child. The biggest example for this is the “Turd in the Wind” line.
How that’s supposed to be intimidating is beyond anyone’s guess. Venom even asks “You feel me?” to go along with it.
8 Why Was Mrs. Chen So Cool?
By cool we don’t mean in a “how awesome was she?” kind of a way. We literally mean how she could be so cool in a situation that should have had her screaming for her life. In the final scene in the store, Mrs. Chen witnesses Eddie Brock turn into an abomination that threatens another human being and then proceeds to completely devour him.
Once that is done with, Mrs. Chen doesn’t miss a beat and inquires upon Eddie as to what just transpired. After Eddie’s casual remark, she isn’t shown being scared in the slightest. Maybe she regularly has monsters eating people at her store.
7 Does Venom Have Spider-Sense?
In his first scene, Venom instructs Eddie not to open the door as he sensed someone was about to knock before it happened. This heavily implied he had some level of Spider Sense; the same Spider-Man regularly makes use of. However, Venom never displays this sense later on.
When they were being tailed by the drone, the symbiote had no clue the drone was approaching in the alley. He also displayed a wonky set of powers seeing that as soon as Eddie donned the symbiote, it had expert knowledge of combat despite never having been in a fight before.
6 Sensitive Hearing
Venom and other symbiotes are affected by supersonic sounds as they have sensitive hearing. In Spider-Man 3, Peter was able to defeat Venom and the symbiote as a whole after making use of extremely loud noises that effectively separated Eddie from the parasite. This was inspired by Spider-Man: The Animated Series where something similar had happened that allowed Peter to take out the symbiote.
But this raises a legitimate question in that how come no other sounds bother Venom? His super hearing would mean he can hear sounds farther away, which should be a liability as somewhere there must be a piercing noise that should affect and weaken him.
