The Last Dance, Sequel Could Be Rated-R

“This one… I’m so, so excited about because we’ve gone much bigger,” star Tom Hardy says (per Forbes). The first trailer for the director and screenwriter Kelly Marcel’s highly anticipated Venom: The Last Dance dropped yesterday (June 3), and the excitement is almost palpable. At the time of this writing, Venom 3 is trending at No. 1 (movies) on YouTube, and the video has amassed over 17.5 million views. And now, Hardy seems to be teasing that fans could see Venom as an R-rated antihero for the very first time. Hardy said in the same interview:

“By the third one, we’ve been given so much creative support to do — to push it.
It’s a much wider piece and
there’s much more love
— not that there was not love in the last ones.
We’ve been allowed to put more of our ideas into it,
and I’m really excited to see how they land […]
I think you got to swing for the fences with these things.”

Hardy, who last appeared as Eddie Brock/Venom in a cameo during the post-credits scene of Spider-Man: No Way Home, continued:

“It’s the last one, and we want to go out with a bang,
and lay the foundations for optionality and possibilities because it’s been such a great ride.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working within that field
and remit of a big film with big ideas,
and a lot of people looking to you to back that up.”

Tom Hardy Admits He Is ‘Attached to It at the Hip and Shoulder’

Tom Hardy is another one of those select actors who has experienced success in both Marvel and DC Comics’ adaptations. First, Hardy showed up as the back-breaking Bane in Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar The Dark Knight Rises, and then six years later he suited up as the Symbiote Venom and the creature’s stubborn human host, Eddie Brock. And while Venom (2018) doesn’t rank as one of Hardy’s best movies for some reason, the actor says he is “attached to it at the hip and shoulder” in Venom: The Last Dance. Hardy said in the same interview:

“Kelly [Marcel] and I have been working with Tom Rothman and Sanford [Panitch] and their Sony team for 7 to 8 years now.
We started off — like initially, [Venom] was just Eddie Brock, and nobody knew what we were going to do.
Then the second [film] — we wrote the second one, we pitched it, got to direct it, put the team together on that. That was huge!
That was a huge university of learning. Not to mention, I had COVID — we had to put [that news] out there.

People were going to judge us, you know?
Marvel Universe under [Kevin] Feige’s management is doing so well. Spider-Man has gone to Feige’s camp at Marvel.
To me and Kelly, it’s so important to pour in everything that we can to build on that opportunity. So, by the third one now,
Kelly is directing it, she’s writing — I’m attached to it at the hip and shoulder, like whatever you need, we’ll figure it out.”

Related

Venom 3 Star Reveals How Tom Hardy’s Infectious Enthusiasm Lights Up the Film Behind the Scenes

Venom 3 star Juno Temple praises Tom Hardy’s devotion to the Marvel antihero.

While Hardy’s feud with Charlize Theron from Mad Max: Fury Road is well-documented, there doesn’t seem to be any such friction in his collaboration with Venom: The Last Dance’s director and screenwriter Kelly Marcel. Marcel is probably best known as having received credit for adapting E.L. James’ novel Fifty Shades of Grey for the big screen in 2015.

Marcel has gone on record since saying that she had little to no control over implementing her own ideas into shaping the script. Friction and feuding weren’t issues on Venom: The Last Dance, as Hardy and Marcel worked together to create the story, which Marcel fashioned into the finished script. And Hardy spoke of “really caring” about Venom 3 during the same sit-down (below):

“If the mission statement is commercial, blockbuster, action and superhero movie,
how can we imbue a sense of something that’s fun and different?
What’s going to entice people that they have a memory, they have a moment, they have an event?
This comes from us who are really, really caring about this.”