And I thought PREDATORS was the only one full of surprises. Last month, the screenwriting team who brought us the awesome Zombieland, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick said they’ve turned in 2 drafts of VENOM to Sony and the rest is for the studio to decide but now THR’s vision reported Sony has hired Gary Ross to write VENOM. To refresh your memory, Ross is the director of Pleasantville and Oscar nominated Seabiscuit, so he knows a thing or two about unleashing the dramatic side of Tobey Maguire, Ross was also hired some time ago to rewrite SPIDER-MAN 4.
So I’m thinking Sony may have been very impressed with his take on the friendly neighborhood that it decides to use his skills again to do a touch up on the drafts set up by Reese and Wernick,… unless… the other scenario might be that Sony didn’t like the drafts and asked Ross to start from zero.
Variety said that in this movie, VENOM would be an arch enemy of the web-slinger that will be transformed into an anti-hero who becomes a defender of the innocent.
The report also states that Ross might be the one to direct VENOM. What worries me is that it’s going to be another X-Men Origins: Wolverine fiasco again.. where an Oscar worthy filmmaker, such as Gavin Hood (Tsotsi) takes on a superhero material that he may or may not be fully familiar with, so the result is a movie that goes against the fans.
The good part about all this for now is that there is currently no mentioning of the name Topher Grace anywhere near VENOM movie. That dufus/weiner is not attached to this project. Excellent!
