The Venom sequel has found its director! On Monday, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Andy Serkis will be overseeing Tom Hardy’s continued descent into gooey, tonguey symbiotic goodness.
While Serkis has a few recent directing credits (2017’s Breathe and 2018’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle), it’s actually his Gollum and Gollum-adjacent work that set him apart. According to THR, “his expertise with CG and performance-capture technology is one of the factors that landed him the Venom 2 gig.” In an earlier feature for Wired, Serkis looked back on his 15+ years of experience—from The Lord of the Rings through Star Wars: The Last Jedi—and the filmmaking tools that have evolved alongside the way.
So, does this mean Venom 2 will stick little white dots all over Tom Hardy? As IndieWire points out, the Venom character was completely CGI in the first film.
“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,” Tom Hardy told Total Film Magazine, per IndieWire. “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 seven-foot tall basketball player in a Lycra suit for the physical shots.”
We’re sure they’ll figure it out.
