In a world where blockbuster movies seem to be getting longer and longer, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a breath of fresh air. Sony recently revealed that the upcoming superhero flick will be just 90 minutes long - a whole 22 minutes shorter than the first Venom movie, which itself was still under two hours. Compared to Avengers: Endgame, which cleared three hours, Venom 2 opting for brevity is the best choice it could make.
We have a writer here who thinks Venom is the best Spider-Man movie ever - I have prayed nightly for their soul - and while my affection for Venom doesn’t extend that far, I enjoyed Tom Hardy’s first outing as both Eddie Brock and the titular Venom. Bringing Woody Harrelson aboard as Carnage seems like a fantastic addition too. This isn’t a dunk on Venom, where if anything, I wish it was ever shorter! Five minutes maybe, that would do the trick. With half of that time dedicated to credits, a la The Simpsons Loki crossover - the worst thing The Simpsons has ever produced. It’s just that 90 minutes seems like the perfect runtime for a film like Venom, and I wish other, similar movies understood that.
The superhero genre as a whole is becoming bloated. Marvel took time and built up a swirling, interconnected universe, and seems to feel as if it’s earned the right to indulge in copy and paste storylines and overly long movies that sag in the middle and end the same predictable way - this is coming from someone who likes the MCU and still watches every movie the week it comes out. The DCEU, on the other hand, is clearly desperate to replicate the MCU, and so is rushing ahead with its ensemble epics, requiring longer runtimes to fit in all the exposition that could and should have been handled in other, previous entries.
Sony has been much smarter with its Spider-Verse-That-Might-Or-Might-Not-Have-Spider-Man-In-It. They really need to think of a snappier name for that. While it clearly piggybacks off the success of Spider-Man itself, and is seeking to fold in Michael Keaton’s Vulture - long term, it must have eyes on Tom Holland’s Spidey too - it’s not trying to be the MCU. Sony might have a deal with Marvel to share custody of Spider-Man, but it knows Marvel is never going to hand any characters over in return. That means it only has a handful of characters in Spider-Man’s universe to call upon, and cannot build a version of the Avengers or the Justice League out of that. Instead, it can tap into the ever-rising popularity of the superhero genre and offer something new.
It's not just superhero films, either. The upcoming James Bond, No Time To Die, is giving Bond fans no time to pee as the longest Bond ever. Three of the next four longest are all Daniel Craig adventures too. Movies keep trying to cram in more plots, more action, more things that appeal to more demographics. More more more and no thought for the people whose primary want from media is for there to be a little less of it. Games are marketed with '100 hours of content' as a selling point, but it just draws a groan from most weary players. 100 hours of filler is not better than 40 hours of engrossing gameplay. Hell, most players are happy with a game that's great for 20 hours then leaves them alone. Likewise, we all flocked to see Endgame, but most of the time we want a light-hearted jaunt at the movies - not every film needs to be an epic. More to the point, not every film should be.
You don’t need to have watched 27 different films beforehand to get all the references in Venom. You don’t need to have read a single comic, or even know that he’s from Spider-Man. You just need to show up - it’s all perfectly contained within its sub-two hour runtime. Venom 2, coming in even shorter, looks set to continue this trend. As Marvel grows more complex and starts to risk leaving casual fans behind with multiverses and fake Doctor Stranges, Sony can fill that void. Venom and Mobius are both darker in aesthetic than the bright and preppy MCU, which may be an issue, but despite so many films going the other way, the promise that it’ll all be over in an hour and a half is more likely to put bums in seats than scare them away.