‘Venom 2’ Officially Locks Down Andy Serkis To Direct [Updated]
Update:It’s official – Andy Serkis will direct Venom 2 for Sony, viaThe Hollywood Reporter. Beyond the news that he’s locked down the gig, no other details are available at this time.
Sony Pictures is on the hunt for aVenom 2director, and the studio recently met with three high-profile contenders for the job.
Rupert Wyatt, who directed the surprisingly greatRise of the Planet of the Apes, is in talks, and he’s competing withBumblebeehelmerTravis Knightas well asAndy Serkis, the actor who portrayed the villainous Ulysses Klaue in Marvel Studios' Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here’s what we know.Varietyreports that Wyatt, Knight, and Serkis are all simply taking meetings for the position, and no front-runner has emerged yet.Ruben Fleischerdirected the first movie, but he isnot returning for the sequel. (He also directed the upcomingZombieland 2: Double Tap.) Wyatt’s recent credits includeCaptive StateandThe Gamblerremake, while Knight has several stop-motion movies under his belt and just moved into live-action for the first time withBumblebee. Serkis, who memorably played performance-capture characters like Gollum in theLord of the Ringsfilms and Caesar in the newestPlanet of the Apestrilogy, has several years' worth of directing experience. He was the second unit director on Peter Jackson’sThe Hobbittrilogy before graduating to the director’s chair himself in 2017 with a small indie drama calledBreathe.
Most recently, he directedMowgli: Legend of the Jungle, a film that combined performance-capture with live-action to middling results. The long-delayed movie ended up being dropped by Warner Bros. and scooped up by Netflix, where it earned a 52% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and a 53% from audiences. That’s not exactly the kind of response that you’d think would get you a meeting with a major studio to direct a huge superhero movie sequel, butThe Hollywood ReportersaysVenom 2will be “effects heavy” and will mix CG with performance capture technology, so perhaps Sony thinks Serkis’s combination of talents is the right fit here.
Interestingly, Serkis once said that starTom Hardywould be playingVenomin the first movie using performance capture technology, but later, Hardy revealed toTotal Filmthat they ended up scrapping that approach:
“It wasn’t motion-capture, because the eyeballs on the creature, on Venom, and the mouth, they don’t match with my eyeballs and mouth. So the mo-cap treatment went out of the window pretty quickly…Facially, your eyes and teeth and tongue are not going to match with this. And you need a 7ft tall basketball player in a Lycra suit for the physical shots.”
So is performance capture back on the menu forVenom 2? Did Serkis, who’s one of the masters working in that field, crack the code and figure out a way to make it work? If nothing else, I suppose Serkis may have a mental edge here because of his deep understanding of the Eddie Brock/Venom dynamic after playing the similarly-split Gollum in so many movies.
Hardy is returning to star in this sequel alongsideMichelle WilliamsandWoody Harrelson, who was teased briefly as the ludicrously-wigged Cletus Kasady, AKA Carnage.Kelly Marcel, one of three credited writers on the first film, is returning to write the screenplay. Sony wantsVenom 2to begin filming this November.
