By The second trailer for Venom has arrived, and it's given us a few more pointers as to where it's headed. We know it'll mix The Thing-style body horror with science-gone-mad morals and a distinctly darker look and feel to your average Marvel film.
We know the rough plot now: Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock is an investigative journalist who's trying to work out what evil science Riz Ahmed's evil scientist Carlton Drake is up to, but comes a cropper when he's infected with a symbiote, an intergalactic parasite, and has to try to come to terms with that while fighting some bad lads. But what else did we learn?
Venom will be kicking off with another symbiote
The hope that Venom would face Spider-Man was always quite a long shot, especially seeing as the action's set in San Francisco rather than Peter Parker's Queens and Venom's slightly scuzzy feel is at odds with Spider-Man's teen flick vibe. There is, however, a big fight with another symbiote like Venom to look forward to. It's not certain whether that other symbiote is Carnage, a longstanding antagonist in the Venom comics which was widely rumoured to appear, or the host-jumping Riot as director Ruben Fleischer suggested at Comic-Con, but Venom will certainly be fighting another gooey alien.
Tom Hardy is obviously very good
Much of the online talk has focussed on sweaty, terrified Brock's Walken-esque cadences, but Hardy also has his malevolent, gleefully vicious Venom voice nailed down. This could be a career highlight - not something you can often say about a comic book movie.
They've fixed the sym-bee-ote pronunciation palaver
Riz Ahmed says sym-bee-ote rather than sym-bye-ote, an apparently offensively incorrect pronunciation which made some fans flip tables over when the first trailer landed. Glad that's settled.
But it might just be the dark Marvel film we've been waiting for
"The world has enough superheroes" is a very good tagline. It suggests the tone is going to be a lot less knockabout than Ant-Man & The Wasp or stretches of Infinity War.
For one thing, they've not bottled out of making Venom a cannibal, and we're probably going to get to see him chomp on some heads. That said, the trailer plays up the Brock/Venom split personality aspect for laughs as well as horror. It's not going to be Tango & Cash, clearly, but they've not gone the full DC with it.
It might be set in Scotland
There's an aerial shot of Glasgow just before Riz Ahmed makes his entrance, implying that his evil lair is somewhere on Clydeside. Then again, there's a shot of the Gherkin in there too, so he could equally have been setting the symbiotes on a decade's worth of Apprentice rejects.
