LogFAQs > #928129761

Aaantlion posted...

Everything about their handling of Venom annoys me, but the special effects were neat. Going ahead with Venom without Spider-Man was just a wtf choice, not unlike when WB uncoupled Catwoman from Batman because they dragged their feet on a Catwoman movie after Batman Returns and Michelle Pfeiffer had gotten old-ish by then.

It's not really THAT crazy. Venom's an alien symbiote who bonds with a user to form a pair that's stronger than the sum of its parts. That's pretty easy to work with even without any connection to Spider-Man in the story. You just need to come up with an excuse for it to be on Earth in the first place, then give it a host. Eddie's as good as any, especially if you stick with the suicidal despair and need to get revenge on SOMEONE aspects of the character (it doesn't HAVE to be Spider-Man). Doubly so if you're skipping his initial villain phase to try and play the character as the anti-hero it sort of evolved into over time.

(And that's assuming you don't skip directly to "Agent Venom" and just have it merge with someone like Flash.)

The original connection to Spider-Man gives you a reason to have web-slinging and the giant white spider symbol on the chest, but those are easy to drop (especially since Venom rarely seems to use webs anyway as opposed to slimy black gloop pseudopods and hitting things really hard). If anything, you're almost better off dropping the connection to Spider-Man, because Venom as a character really doesn't fit well at all with the MCU version of Spider-Man (just like it didn't fit with Raimi's 1960s-inspired version of the character).

As for the other, the problem with the Catwoman movie wasn't that Batman wasn't in it. It was the fact that they went for a weird supernatural angle where literally the only actual connection to Catwoman was the name - and the fact that the writing was atrocious and the acting was terrible. It would be incredibly easy to write a Selina Kyle Catwoman movie where you explore her roots as a young girl, coming from a broken home, living on the streets, learning to steal to survive, and ultimately developing into an adrenaline-junkie cat-burglar. Then you throw in the stereotypical cliche where she watches over other innocents on the street (which is straight out of the comics), and you've set up motivation for her to eventually use her skills to steal from the evil to protect the innocent. Play her as a Robin Hood-esque character, potentially with a touch of greed where she's not entirely noble (maybe eventually setting up an eventual future interaction with Bruce Wayne when she steals something from him).

Obvious scenes for a movie like that is where you establish she had to learn how to fight to protect herself (thus justifying the eventual future fight scenes), and if we're going full-on cliche, she's taught and protected early on by a sympathetic gang member who protects her, and who will inevitably die later to help motivate her revenge arc on the bad guys. Or you could skew closer to the comic origins, and have her train at the local gym with an old ex-boxer/fighter (who inevitably dies).

Introduce your cliche sidekick character of a young street girl in danger of falling to drugs or prostitution (or worse) who she feels protective of in a sisterly fashion, and the movie's almost written itself. With bonus points because now you've got the option to have a "Catgirl" character in a later film.

This shit really isn't that hard. It's only when a studio has disdain for the material that you get movies like Catwoman or the 1980s Captain America.
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