If your reaction to the Venom Horse in the Venom: The Last Dance trailer was “Holy s***, this is awesome!,” then you know how the cast and crew of the newest Sony Marvel movie felt seeing the epic creation go from script to screen. The third and questionably final film in Sony’s Venom saga is set directly after the previous 2021 film Venom: Let There Be Carnage, in which actor Woody Harrelson played the Carnage criminal Cletus Kasady. Investigative journalist Eddie Brock, played by Tom Hardy, and his symbiote buddy Venom are on the run from the military, hitchhiking across the country in various vehicles, including the wildly majestic Venom Horse that has taken the internet by storm.
Director Kelly Marcel and VFX supervisor John Moffatt talked to Entertainment Weekly about the intensive and hilarious process of making the Venom Horse come to life, including how Hardy sent crying and laughing emojis after reading about the creature in the script. While the idea was golden from the start, the execution of bringing the unhinged symbiote into a larger-than-life animal form was tricky, to say the least. When Moffatt saw the line introducing the Venom Horse, “Eddie climbs aboard and Venom Horse gallops like absolute steaming f— across the desert while he holds on for dear life,” he knew he had to pull some wacky VFX tricks to capture the chaotic speed of the first symbiote animal of the films.
“Kelly wanted the thing to be massive, but if we made the horse really, really massive, it made Tom look really, really tiny, which was weird, so we found that it was really, really helpful for the horse to kick up a load of dust and debris to convey a sense of speed while still making sure this thing looks like it’s got mass. We worked really hard with [VFX supervisor] Dave [Lee] and the animation team at Double Negative to try and convey that sense of mass, and added some subtle camera shake to it to try and really drive that home.” – Moffatt via EW
Moffatt reminisced about how they shot practical scenes with a real-life, normal-sized horse, and added the VFX effects on top of the footage. As for the actual scenes of Brock riding the Venom Horse, the production team rigged Hardy up to multiple wires and put him on a fake horse to throw him around and capture the images of Brock flying on the back of the hellish horse.
Venom Horse Can Be Seen In All Its Glory this Fall
Marcel told EW that as they honed the image for Venom Horse in post-production, the character became even more hilarious. Much time and dedication seem to have gone into the massive symbiote horse, which will be revealed to audiences worldwide when Venom: The Last Dance lands on October 25, exclusively in theaters. With a 110-minute runtime, longer than Let There Carnage and right around the length of the first film, Tom Hardy should have plenty of time to do Venom justice in what may be his last appearance.
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Although Marcel and Moffatt gave intricate details about the making of the Venom Horse, fans will have to wait until the film’s release to get to know Venom in his new form. Audiences are already hyped to see Venom inhabit a horse and take his friend Eddie Brock on a wild ride. Who knows what other Venom-adjacent characters the two will find in their adventure?
Venom 3 is the third and final installment in Sony’s symbiote trilogy starring Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock. It follows the events of Let There Be Carnage, where the anti-hero fought serial killer Cletus Kasady, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, where Brock was briefly transported to the MCU through the multiverse.
- Release Date
- October 25, 2024