Watch the action-packed teaser trailer for “Venom” starring Tom Hardy

The film is a spin-off from the Spider-Man franchise, which was rebooted in 2017 with Spider-man: Homecoming.

The teaser trailer, unfortunately, does not show him transforming into the snarling wall-crawler.

It’s hard to believe a Venom standalone film is really happening, but the fact can no longer be denied. And these movies tend to exist outside the Disney umbrella – the X-Men series (20th Century Fox), Logan (20th Century Fox) and, now, Venom (Sony).

Well, that certainly was…something. And look, I get why they didn’t want to put Venom in this trailer. “You know, Tom… it’s like a masterclass watching him act every day and he’s such a risk taker and he loved this character”, he said. Once that merges with Brock, Venom is born.

Venom will hail from Sony’s Marvel Universe of characters and will not be a spinoff of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe, wherein Sony allows Spider-Man to be played by Tom Holland. That’s a fascinating premise, and one that often gets overshadowed by what Venom looks like in the black costume.

Still, I’m personally holding out hope that the first full trailer actually shows us a full-on Venom rather than just the symbiote in a lab.

But there is no glimpse of the Spider-Man villain. Given the success of recent R-rated comic book adaptations like Deadpool and Logan, fans wondered whether Sony would be willing to embrace the grittiness of its titular character, and make Venom a more adult-oriented adaptation. Now it’s Hardy’s turn to give it a go.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer from a script by Jeff Pinkner and Scott Rosenberg, Venom stars Tom Hardy, Jenny Slate, Michelle Williams, Porsha Williams and Riz Ahmed. Here’s the synopsis, which contains the phrase “badass”, so you know this film means business.

In our new version of the trailer, which you can watch above, Tom Hardy has been taken back to his days as Batman’s nemesis from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. (Forget months or years of postproduction and reshoots like we’ve grown accustomed to with certain blockbuster movies.) I’m all aboard this Venom train.

If you have any hesitation about Venom, have no fear.