After Chronicle grossed over $126 million on a $12 million budget, director Josh Trank soon found himself fielding a number of big offers in Hollywood. Among them was Venom, a movie Sony Pictures has desperately been trying to make happen for years by the time the filmmaker pitched his take.
Talking to Polygon, Trank explained that he pitched a hard-R Venom movie similar in tone to The Mask.
After he and Big Fan director Rob Siegel spent two weeks putting together a treatment for the film, they presented that to The Amazing Spider-Man producer Matt Tolmach, and he "hated" it.
"I didn’t like how Matt Tolmach was coming at me in that situation, because it felt very kind of authoritative," the filmmaker explained. "Well, if you don’t like what I’m doing, and you’re telling me that I have to do something along the lines of what you want, and you’re going to tell it to me in this way — sorry, but I have other things I can be doing."
One of those things was a big screen adaptation of Sony video game Shadow of the Colossus. However, Trank was attached to it for such a short amount of time, all he really remembers was his writer delivering "one of the most awkward, squirmiest pitches I’ve ever seen before." He also makes it clear that, now, "I couldn’t give a f*ck about any good video games or turning any property into anything else."
It's fascinating to hear Trank speak to openly about his Hollywood near misses, and it seems like Sony Pictures was never open to an R-Rated Venom movie, something fans spent years campaigning for. Ultimately, we got the PG-13 which was a box office hit, but widely panned by fans and critics.