Venom 2 Just Got A Shocking New Release Date

Fans waiting for Tom Hardy to hit screens with Venom 2 will be excited. It looks like Let There Be Carnage is coming sooner than later.

By Doug Norrie | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

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It’s a wild time in the movie industry right now with studios making almost daily changes to release schedules for upcoming films. Such is the case during these pandemic times when movie theater uncertainty has studios needing to pivot and sometimes repivot around releases. Usually, that means a film getting pushed back, but other times we get good news. The latter is the case with Venom 2.  Tom Hardy’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage is actually moving up the timeline for its movie theater run. According to CNBC, the film will now hit theaters on October 1st, two weeks earlier than the original plan. 

Apparently, Venom 2 moving up is directly related to this past weekend’s success of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The latest Marvel Cinematic Universe addition absolutely crushed the box office, earning nearly $76 million through its first few days and setting the record for the best-ever Labor Day weekend release. It was apparently encouraging enough for Sony to feel good about having Tom Hardy hit the big screen a couple of weeks earlier. 

It remains to be seen if other delayed movies like the next James Bond film No Time to Die, or Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick will follow suit. Again, this is an ever-shifting landscape with new information coming out on the regular that can change the studio’s collective minds. But this latest update on Venom 2 is more than a little encouraging, a sign that the movie theater tailspin around releases might be coming to an end. 

Tom Hardy

Venom 2  is the follow-up to 2018s Venom with Tom Hardy reprising the role of Eddie Brock/ Venom. The original movie was a surprise hit for the recently renamed Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. It tallied a little north of $856 million at the box office on its $115 million budget. This stood in rather stark contrast to the film’s critical reception with the Rotten Tomatoes score sitting at a lowly 30%. But the audience reaction is significantly higher at 81%. Of course, money talks the most though and a sequel is on the way. 

In Venom 2 we will catch up with Brock as he continues to adjust to life with his alien symbiote alter ego. And in Let There Be Carnage they will face a foe who is about as powerful and scary as you will see in this universe. That is going to be Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady/ Carnage who is imbued with the same alien parasite after a jailhouse visit from Brock. The film will also introduce Naomi Harris’s Shriek to the mix as well. 

Venom 2 was supposed to have been released almost a year ago in October 2020. But the Covid-19 pandemic put a pause on that with theaters only recently beginning to operate at full capacity once again. They originally had planned to release the film this past June but again, uncertainty around box office attendance pushed it to the fall. There had even been rumors of another possible delay, but the performance of Shang-Chi has clearly shifted that decision in a positive direction. Get ready for Venom:  Let There Be Carnage to now hit screens at the beginning of October.