Venom to get Solo Film?

Posted by bob in Comics, Films, News on July 31st, 2008

Everyone is anxious for details on Sony’s fourth Spider-Man film, already announced for 2011 so fans got surprised when Variety reported this morning that the studio is now focused first on a Venom spinoff project.

Jacob Estes (Mean Creek) had been assigned the unenviable task of writing a screenplay featuring the monstrous alien symbiote that ruins people’s lives while consuming other people. After his draft, the production execs have decided to go in a different direction so he’s off and a new writer has yet to be named.

Sony has also let it be known that Topher Grace, who was the human consumed by the symbiote in Spider-Man 3, may not return in the solo project.  They are mum on casting until a script is approved and a director attached.

What of Sam Raimi?  He said at Comic-Con International that he’d be open to a fourth go-round but hasn’t signed anything with the studio.  Instead, he has turned himself into the busiest man in Hollywood.  The trades today reported that he has signed with Disney to make the superheroic film, The Transplants.  The original action-adventure notion came from writers Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson (Not Another Teen Movie) which Raimi will produce with Josh Donen.