 What's up and welcome to One Take. I'm Gil and today we're talking about some more Marvel-related news but we're not talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We're talking about Sony's Marvel Spider-Man supporting characters slash villain universe. That's right. We're talking about Venom. We've known for a while now there was a sequel on the way but just the other day news broke that there were three directors that were in contention for the role and that was Rupert Wyatt who was known mostly for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Travis Knight who's known for Bumblebee and Andy Circus who's not really known for directing. He's more known for all this motion capture work, Smeagol, Planet of the Ape and other motion capture produced characters. So that to me was always the more interesting choice and then we found out today that officially Andy Circus will be directing Venom 2. Now before we talk about whether or not that's good news let's talk about Venom 1 for a second. Before that movie came out I was actually kind of excited for it. I remember early on when it was just going into production we heard some interesting things about what it could be. Things like it's going to be a sci-fi horror R-rated take on the material and when you say Spider-Man's not going to be involved in it really the only way to make it interesting is to say you're going to do something unusual for a comic book movie and that would be an interesting take on the material but as we got closer to Venom's actual release they started to do a little bit of a 180 on that. So I remember early on hearing it's going to be R-rated and then closer to the release it might have been Ruben Fleischer the director who said it but he was like R-rated no no we never said that and it ended up being a sort of exactly what you'd expect cheesy over the top but not really that funny just not a great movie and I have to confess I never actually saw the movie but my brother saw it and we have the exact same opinion and taste in everything so I feel confident in saying I wouldn't have been a fan of the first one. Now is it good news that Andy Serkis is directing Venom 2? He's pretty untested he's directed a couple of things the biggest thing he's directed was the Straight to Netflix jungle book movie Mowgli Legend of the Jungle this was kind of a weird release it came out right after John Favreau's much more popular live action remake of the jungle book titled The Jungle Book. Apparently Andy Serkis's Mowgli was a little bit of a darker take on the material it didn't have music in it it tried to be a little bit more grounded but it wasn't received very well. On Rotten Tomatoes it scored about a 52% and some of the criticisms towards it were about Andy Serkis's difficulty in landing the right tone for that movie. Now if I wanted to be optimistic about this I'd say at least he tried to do something different with the material and with one of my biggest complaints for Venom is that they went too light and they should have gone darker. We have one example where Andy Serkis has made a large feature film and what he did is take material that was traditionally lighter in tone and tried to make it darker. So why did Sony select Andy Serkis to direct this movie? There's a few possibilities I can think of one of them is that they are trying to go for a little bit of a darker tone they saw him do it with Mowgli maybe they were happy with the results if that's the case that gives me a little bit of hope maybe something different will happen with Venom 2 that gives us a reason to look forward to it. Another possibility is Sony knows that Andy Serkis has a ton of experience with motion capture he's basically considered the best in the business when it comes to that and maybe they want to up their game on the effects in this movie but at the same time Andy Serkis has landed his motion capture expertise to plenty of movies that he didn't direct so it would feel a little silly to put him in the director's chair for just that reason. The third reason I can think of and this is the more cynical side of me talking is that Sony just wants to turn out a studio approved sequel to Venom 1 Andy Serkis is a new director doesn't have a lot of experience here so he'll probably be pretty easy to control and they'll get the corporate approved movie that they want. So you can probably tell I feel pretty cynical about this sequel the one thing that really bothers me about it is that Sony has proven that they can take these superhero properties and do something really interesting with them in fact they've proven it with Spider-Man. I was annoyed for a little while now that Sony had control over some of these characters but that changed with the release of Spider-Man into the spider-verse because one of my biggest complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I love the MCU I've seen every movie I loved Endgame but there is a feeling that a lot of them are pretty similar they all go for the sort of action comedy tone and Spider-Man into the spider-verse was one of the first superhero movies I've seen in a while besides maybe Logan and Deadpool that really did something unique and different so Sony proved they can do it but I wish they would apply the same principles outside of animation for example we really haven't seen a sci-fi horror superhero movie and that's what they originally talked up Venom 1 to be so if Sony were willing to take a chance and do something really different with that sort of a dark tone I would be a lot more interested in this movie so overall I clearly wasn't really excited for Venom 2 when we knew it was coming the fact that Andy Serkis is directing it's sort of a curiosity I'm interested to see what he does with it considering he doesn't have a lot of directing experience but for this one for me to get interested I really need to hear that they're going to do something totally different from the first one either go for a darker tone or just find some creative take that says this is going to be something more than just a cheesy action retread of the first one anyway I think that wraps it up leave a comment on this video let us know what you thought of Venom 1 how do you feel about this news and are you looking forward to Venom 2 and if you enjoyed this video make sure to like it subscribe to our channel and hit the little bell icon so you get notifications whenever we release more videos like this one thanks for watching