Why Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage & Hollywood Should Be Extremely Worried
This essay examines Tom Hardy's upcoming Venom movie; and even though it looks amazing, Sony, has to be sweating over what happened to Black Widow.
It’s time to stop looking at superhero movies as "Printing Money”.
That was when we were in the “Superhero Boom” of 2008-2019. Where a Studio could spend $400M; and expect a healty return, plus, promotion for their next movie.
Everyone except, Zack Snyder. He couldn’t even break the billion-dollar mark with a movie starring Batman and Superman.
Then, March of 2020, came. Which traumatized an entire planet.
Add that with the most controversial Presidential Election in history—and Entertainment finds themself in utter chaos of being in the unknown for the first time ever. Half of America hates them; and the other half is too busy playing games and streaming Netflix to care.
Not only that; but, Black Widow, was recently denied in China.
Arguably, the world’s biggest movie market now. Which could create endless ripples and permeations throughout Hollywood. They spent years shaping a plan in order to better market their products to the Chinese.
And it all could be for naught.
Why wouldn’t China do this? I mean, would you want to compete with Hollywood when you don’t have to? Instead, just release a few movies every here and there when your slate is running slow.
Which leads us to Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage. The followup to the highly popular Venom; that made $856,085,151 worldwide. However, there’s a small caveat; the original made $269,196,633 in China.
At the time, a new record.
What Is Hollywood Going To Do?
Now, we could sit here and speculate other reasons why China doesn’t want Hollywood’s shit anymore. For example: Could Social Justice be so ingrained in every movie; and China doesn’t want their people exposed to U.S. Propaganda?
Or is it simply business?
Anyways, I scoured Google for any information about Venom 2’s Chinese release and found nothing. Which is a horrible sign for a movie releasing in September. Usually, big projects will receive a heads up.
But that was in 2019.
The Cold, Hard Truth
To put it in perspective: Venom made almost a third of its money in China. Which is huge. And now, that market could be gone forever.
Just think about if you were to wake up one sunny morning to find out you loss a third of your future pay. It would put your life and mental health through the ringer. Hell, it might be something you’re unable to truly recover from. Your life is now changed forever.
This is the reality that Hollywood is facing. The world’s biggest movie market doesn’t want to do business with them; and the second biggest is currently in a Cold Civil War.
But on a positive note: Tom Hardy’s Venom 2 looks fantastic. It has a great B-Movie vibe as well as looking twenty times more weirder than the first.
I’m truly excited.
Yet, I wonder how Hollywood is feeling about their current predicament?