Venom: Let There Be Carnage was supposed to be released last October, but the COVID-19 pandemic led to a series of delays. The sequel finally arrived in theaters last week, and Sony Pictures was right to wait as a $90.1 million opening has seen Venom crowned the undisputed box office king.
The ReelBlend Podcast caught up with director Andy Serkis in late September, and he admitted that the delay was massively beneficial as "the original release date was nigh on impossible" to meet. "I'll be truthful. We finished the last visual effects shot last week. We've just kept refining, kept refining...it would've been a much poorer movie visually because there was so much to do. You know, the ambition for it was huge, and the time was not really long enough to really execute it."
After explaining the challenges that came with putting the finishing touches to a movie over Zoom, Serkis went on to break down the complexities of VFX in a movie like Venom: Let There Be Carnage.
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"Then, of course, all the visual effects work. The visual effects team is sprawling across the planet and the animators and the CG artists and the visual effects supervisor, producers, all in different places in the world," he noted. "We just had to be disciplined about how we review the shots."
That extra time certainly seems to have benefited Serkis' sequel, with a 58% Rotten Tomatoes score that puts it on the cusp of a "Fresh" rating. Positive word of mouth has helped Venom: Let There Be Carnage break box office records, and earned it an impressive 85% Audience Score on the review aggregator (Venom, on the other hand, received 30% from critics and 81% from audiences).
It's interesting to think about what might have been had this movie been released as planned last September, especially as it managed to beat its predecessor's opening even in this "pandemic era."
Venom: Let There Be Carnage is now playing in theaters.