The Original Opening for ‘Venom’ Was Completely Different

Venom is in theaters now, and despite negative reviews from critics, audiences decided to see the Marvel Comics movie for themselves, taking the movie to an $80 million opening weekend. Whether audiences walked away satisfied and hungry to see where Venom goes next remains to be seen, but there is at least one hint of what might be included in future Venom movies thanks to an alternate opening to the film revealed by director Ruben Fleischer.

Cinema Blend sat down for an interview with Ruben Fleischer, and he revealed that the opening scene for the movie was almost a little more out of this world. Literally.

The opening scene in Venom starts off in space as a Life Foundation space shuttle is returning from some kind of mission. As the shuttle is entering the atmosphere, it starts burning up and taking damage. The shuttle ends up crashing in the middle of a forest in Malaysia, and a clean-up crew comes to take care of the disaster. However, one of the shuttle’s astronauts (John Jameson, for those paying attention) is already infected by a symbiote, and as they’re taken away in an ambulance, the symbiote jumps to one of the paramedics and causes the ambulance to crash spectacularly. Then the newly infected paramedic begins the long walk to a more populated area.

That’s a mysterious introduction to the symbiotes that gives us an idea of what the symbiotes can do, but without explaining much about them. However, the Venom alternate opening would have provided much more insight into what these symbiotes are and where they came from. Ruben Fleischer explains:

“The beginning of the movie was a hard one. Like, how much do we want to tell the backstory? There was a version where there was a planet crawling with tons of symbiotes that were collected and taken back to Earth by the Life Foundation. They had encountered them. But it kind of felt like, my instinct was it would be better to keep it more mysterious and just know that they’ve retrieved something from space. We don’t know exactly by what means or how. Jenny [Slate]’s character later says they encountered it on a comet that was passing, and they retrieved these samples and brought it back to Earth. But yeah, I thought it was better just leave it a little bit mysterious, the backstory of the aliens.”

Fleischer’s instincts may have been better from a storytelling perspective. We don’t need to know much about these symbiotes yet, and it’s better if we learn about them as the movie goes on, even if it’s through lame exposition. As it stands, the more interesting part of symbiotes anyway is their personality once they’re attached to a host.

The good news is that we could still end up seeing the symbiote planet at some point in the future. There are even already designs and concept art that were drawn up for the Venom alternate opening we won’t see. Producer Matt Tolmach explains:

“We toyed with some art work that we loved. … We toyed with it. But we wanted the movie — it’s out there. It’s part of our mythology. It’s part of our backstory, Klyntar and where this all came from and who knows what’s next. But, it made sense to, in this movie, to let the origin of those things kind of unravel in the storytelling is as opposed to going [to that planet].”

Maybe more details about the home planet of symbiotes can be explored in the planned story arc for the sequel, which was teased rather obviously in the mid-credtis scene of Venom. Maybe they’ll explain why it took the symbiote Riot six months to find the Malaysian airport, all while in the same body of an old woman instead of finding a more suitable host.

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