Sony’s Venom franchise has a new final destination.
The studio behind the Marvel anti-hero movies has set an unexpected course for the next installment, deciding to make it an animated feature rather than live-action.
And it has tapped Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, the duo behind last year’s surprise horror hit FinalDestination: Bloodlines, to direct and produce the project.
Amy Pascal, Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, who worked on the Venom movies, will likely produce the feature but because the project is at a nascent state, those details remain unclear.
Tom Hardy is understood to be involved in some capacity as well. It is unclear whether he would produce or even return to voice Venom as well after starring in the studio’s recent trio of live-action movies as Eddie Brock, the human who bonds with the black oozy alien symbiote.
No writer is attached to the project although Sony’s animation arm, Sony Pictures Animation, is opening up a writers room to develop the a script or takes.
Venom, created by writer Bill Michelinie and artist Todd McFarlane, was famously introduced as a villain in 1988’s Amazing Spider-Man No. 300, and quickly became a fan-favorite as well as one of his arch-nemeses. He got his first solo comic in 1993. The character then made his big-screen debut in Sam Raimi’s Amazing Spider-Man 3, played by Topher Grace.
Released in 2018, Venom, toplined by Hardy, scored as astounding $856 million worldwide, opening Sony’s eyes to the popularity of the character in the height of the comic book movie boom. However, the franchise took a slow downward slope, financially and creatively, with 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($506.8 million) and then Venom: The Last Dance $478.9 million in 2024.
Going the animation route in theory allows Sony to keep Venom-related content fresh and relevant. SPA has found great success, and Oscar gold, making animated Spider-Verse movies with the Phil Lord and Chris Miller as writers and producers. The animation process, however, is painstakingly slow and with a script not even on the horizon, any Venom movie is years away.
Lipovsky and Stein, meanwhile, know a thing or two about bringing in fresh blood to long-in-the-tooth franchises. With Bloodlines, hey reinvigorated a moribund Warners title, helming the first Final Destination movie in about 14 years to a $315.0 million gross. It became not only the highest-grossing entry in the franchise but also the best-reviewed.
Since then, they have become one of the town’s It filmmakers, and were brought on board to work with Chris Columbus on Gremlins. They are also developing to direct the original thriller Long Lost, described as What Lies Beneath meets Rosemary’s Baby and set up at Universal with Amblin Entertainment producing.
Lipovsky and Stein are repped by Verve, Ground Control and Lichter Grossman.
