I guess it would be fair to start this from the beginning. Remember back to Spider-Man 3. I think it would be safe to say a lot of us were really excited about seeing Venom on the screen. Well, at least, I was. However, the movie, after watching it so many times after so many years, I have realized how bad it really was. My young eyes had deceived me. Venom had been done poorly, especially considering how cool the character had appeared in the comics. We obviously want a Venom done right.
But movie audiences have a big attention span. It was clear that The Amazing Spider-Man suffered because of the reboot and now there would be a reboot through Venom. Now, it could work as an Eddie Brock movie but the Eddie Brock origin requires a lot. It requires Spider-Man to be there and a lot of story baggage to get Eddie Brock to the place he needs to be thematically. It could work but it would be more difficult. A better path, at least in my opinion, would be to go with Flash Thompson's Venom.
I mean, Flash could go right into the military after graduating, which we know is part of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. OsCorp could be getting into the business of making super soldiers, finally using a suit that was originally designed to cure cancer but became a suit that could create super soldiers. Flash gets shot in the line of duty and paralyzed from the waist down. This prompts the military to equip the most-promising wounded soldier with the ability to continue to serve his country. With the success of the Venom suit on Thompson, OsCorp could create a new suit for one of the more sadistic but extremely good soldiers: Cletus Kassidy. With the power of the suit at Kassidy's fingertips, he wreaks Carnage upon the battlefield, going AWOL and thinking himself above everyone. With Venom, the United States government send Venom in to take care of Carnage, once and for all.
Or it could work something like this. I'm just thinking that this way the spin-off still acts within the whole "OsCorp is behind everything" theme of the universe but this film looks better adapt at standing on its own instead of having to tie directly into the Spider-Man films. Not only this, but it allows the film franchise to develop heroes where few exist within their properties. And it is not like they couldn't get around to making Eddie Brock a symbiote but it would mean that they aren't in such a rush and it would come in its own time where the Flash spin-off lends itself to creation immediately. It would remove some of the baggage of finding a way to tie in Spider-Man directly.
This would effectively make Spider-Man the Iron Man of the universe, not actually connected to the government and operating separately while also being monitored by say...the CIA? I don't know. And the US Government would be in complete control of the Spider-Man universe's Captain America in Agent Venom or Flash Thompson. Not only this, but since Flash and Peter are already pre-established with each other, it would lend itself to a whole team-up thing much better.
It looks like we will be getting the Venom movie sometime in 2017, a date which has not yet been announced and a Sinister Six movie actually being the fourth Spider-Man movie announced, telling the "taking down Spider-Man" story from the point of view of the villains and not Spider-Man, but Spider-Man still being present in the story. If it works, Spider-Man and Agent Venom could co-exist as heroes in the universe, with Stan Lee and Avi Arad still developing that other movie that will feature original superheroes or whatever. Maybe they'll give us the Thor or the Hulk of the universe...? All in all, at the end of the decade, we could have:
Spider-Man: The Iron Man of the Spider-Man universe
Agent Venom: The Captain America of the Spider-Man universe
IDK Hancock(?): The Hulk of the Spider-Man universe
IDK (???): The Thor of the Spider-Man universe
TBA agent: The Hawkeye of the Spider-Man universe
Black Cat: The Black Widow of the Spider-Man universe
Or maybe they will just form a three-pronged team of Spider-Man, Agent Venom and Black Cat. Maybe they'll introduce Miles Morales as another Spider character to join the spider team.
The thing is, in the end, SONY has plenty of villains they can use. They have so few real heroes they can use. Sure, they can bring in Miles Morales but that requires time and creativity that SONY doesn't seem willing to put in (and rightly so as it would be too late by that time) and they only have like anti-heroes like Silver Sable and Black Cat. Why not use Agent Venom, a ready made hero for the studio to utilize instead of making yet ANOTHER villain movie?
Anyway, sound off below on what you guys think!