#Tom Hardy Gets Story Credit for Venom: Let There Be Carnage

With The Suicide Squad arriving in cinemas next month, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage arriving in September, it’s an exciting time for fans of darker, less family friendly superhero movies. The Venom sequel, in particular, is gaining a lot of attention at the moment, and one thing that has been recently noted is that Tom Hardy seems to be expanding his role in the franchise – not on screen, but being credited as story writer. While there are a number of other changes in the sequel crew to the 2018 entry in Sony’s Marvel Universe, according to new information, Hardy has been taking a much more involved role in where his character is headed.

As far as Venom goes, his arrival on screen in 2018 with Tom Hardy playing Eddie Brock, the human face of Spider-Man’s alien symbiote enemy, was a bigger success than many expected, given the somewhat ropey history of the character’s less than satisfying appearance in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. Against the odds, the movie made just over $850 million worldwide, putting it well and truly in the ballpark of the red suited web slinger when he is not being aided by the power of the MCU’s Endgame wave. Due to a less than glowing critic response, a sequel was never a given thing, but when a movie can set a number of records and become the seventh highest grossing film of the year, there is a good chance the studio is going to take a punt on a follow up.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage picks up from the mid-credit scene from the first movie, which saw Hardy’s Brock visiting Woody Harrelson’s serial killer Cletus Kasady in prison, as the two will come to blows when Harrelson is befriended by the chaotic red symbiote Carnage. As well as changes to director, with the well-accomplished Andy Serkis helming the movie, the screenplay is this time the sole duty of Kelly Marcel. Although Hardy receives a “Story By” credit, so the question is has Tom Hardy channeled a little of his 19th Century namesake? Well, not quite, but he has been working closely with British screenwriter Marcel, with whom he has been collaborating with for almost two decades.

As well as being one of the writers on Venom, Marcel was brought in to do un-credited re-writes of Hardy’s 2008 movie, Bronson. She later worked on Saving Mr. Banks, Fifty Shades of Grey and co-wrote the story for Disney’s Cruella. Speaking to Empire, she revealed how this is the first time Hardy has been credited in the writing side of a movie. “This is new for him, to get credit, but it’s not new for him to be this involved. He’s absolutely 100 percent committed to everything that he does. He’s married to Venom. He loves this character. He’s very involved in what he thinks should happen.”

While Hardy is involved in a number of ways, she did point out that he doesn’t exactly sit down at a desk and scribble out a script. That part of the work was still all Marcel’s “He doesn’t get a pen and write. We spent months breaking the story together on FaceTime, riffing on ideas, seeing what worked, seeing what didn’t. Then I took everything we spoke about and holed up somewhere for three months quietly, knocking out a script.”

We will see how Hardy’s input comes across when Venom: Let There Be Carnage arrives in cinemas on September 15, and the full interview with Kelly Marcel can be read in The Suicide Squad issue of Empire magazine.

This story comes to us from empireonline