One of the biggest cinematic surprises of 2025 was Final Destination: Bloodlines, which not only became the best-reviewed entry in the 26-year-old franchise, but it was also a sleeper hit at the box office, becoming the highest grossing Final Destination movie with an estimated worldwide gross of $318 million. Following this success, the movie’s directors, Canadian Zach Lipovsky and his American creative partner Adam B. Stein, became one of the most sought-after up-and-coming filmmakers in the film industry, initially being tapped to co-write Gremlins 3 with the franchise creator Chris Columbus.
Now, the duo has settled on their next directorial effort, as they have somewhat unexpectedly been hired by Sony Pictures to direct an animated feature centring on the Marvel anti-hero Venom.
The character of Venom was co-created by famed Canadian comic book artist and writer Todd McFarlane in the 1980s and has since gone on to become one of the most iconic villains-turned-antiheroes in comics. The character featured prominently in one of the most famous Spider-Man storylines, wherein the Web-Head becomes host to a malevolent alien symbiote, increasing the superhero’s power, but at the cost of darkly altering his personality. Spider-Man would eventually sever himself from the parasitic symbiote, which would consequently bond with Eddie Brock in his stead, marking the best-known rendition of the character.
Since his inception, Venom has gone on to appear across other mediums outside of comics, including numerous animated series and video games, but it was not until 2007 that Venom made his feature film and live-action debut in Sam Raim’s Spider-Man 3 to negative responses from fans and critics, a sentiment that has largely endured over the years. One of the producers, the legendary Avi Arad, even took the blame for insisting Raimi shoehorn Venom into a plot that already included Harry Osborn’s New Goblin and the Sandman, telling Screen Rant in 2018, “I think we learned that Venom is not a sideshow. In all fairness, I’ll take the guilt because of what Sam Raimi used to say in all of these interviews feeling guilty that I forced him into it.”
Venom would not appear in another live-action feature film again until his first solo outing, 2018’s Venom, starring Tom Hardy as the Eddy Brock rendition of the character. What’s complicated, though, is that Sony owns the rights to Spider-Man and his rogues gallery, and Sony had already gone into business with Marvel Studios by integrating the Web-Slinger into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), first appearing in a supporting role in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, before getting his own series of solo movies in the MCU, beginning with 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. However, all these ventures had to be done in partnership with Marvel Studios, and Sony wanted to capitalize on the immense popularity of the MCU by making seemingly MCU-adjacent movies centring on other Spider-Man-affiliated characters they had the rights to…but without Spider-Man.
This meant they could make their own live-action movies without having to share the glory/earnings with Marvel, and all the while they are still able to tenuously tie these properties to the then-infallible box office machine that is the MCU. This cynical approach certainly worked, at least initially, as 2018’s Venom made a staggering $856.1 million at the global box office, and this was followed by two sequel that were also strong box office successes. Despite a loyal fanbase, reviews for each entry in the Venom trilogy were mixed at best, though their reception was nonetheless much better than the other movies Sony based on characters associated with Spider-Man, with Morbius (2022), Madame Web (2024), and Kraven the Hunter (2024) being shredded by critics, to the point that they are already considered amongst the worst comic book movies of all time, acting more as meme generators than actual entertainment.
However, it’s important to note that while 2018’s Venom began a rough creative run for live-action Marvel features at Sony, that same year they also happened to release their own animated reimagining of the Spider-Man property with no connection to the MCU whatsoever, titled Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. In contrast to Sony’s shoddy live-action movies, Into the Spider-Verse was an unmitigated creative and commercial success lauded for its groundbreaking animation, and not only did it go on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but it is the best-reviewed superhero movie of all time on Rotten Tomatoes.
Details are still sparse on the Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein animated Venom feature, with the only other information released so far being that Tom Hardy and live-action franchise screenwriter (who also directed the third entry, Venom: The Last Dance) Kelly Marcel will serve as producers, so it is fair to assume that Sony are looking to give Venom the Spider-Verse treatment and reimagine the character in a new creative light. Given how early in the process this is, an intended release date has yet to be announced, but if the Spider-Verse movies are any indication, we are looking at 2027 at the earliest, if not 2028 or even 2029 depending on how ambitious the project is. Nonetheless, if the filmography of Lipovsky and Stein is anything to go by, this new rendition of Venom is in promising hands.