LOS ANGELES, Nov 23 — Sony Pictures Entertainment has announced two 2020 theatrical release dates for a pair of untitled films, with current thinking indicating that they are both connected to the Spider-Man saga: A sequel to international box office hit Venom and an aisle-crossing Jared Leto movie Morbius.
An untitled Sony-Marvel sequel and an original Sony-Marvel movie are set for 2020, according to the motion picture studio.
Venom might not have been given a warm welcome by reviewers or audiences — a comparatively weak CinemaScore rating of B+ from opening day audiences, usually taken to predict a modest box office future.
Nevertheless, with its teen-friendly PG-13 age gate, dark and off-the-wall humour, and lead character’s struggle with a hardly restrained, muscle-bound tower of instinct and destruction, October’s antihero movie has been tearing up the international box office with a US$779 million (RM3.27 billion) worldwide gross.
So a second movie is most definitely on the cards — in fact, headline actor Tom Hardy has already signed on to make Venom into a trilogy.
And sticking it to Sony’s October 2, 2020 date would fit the first film’s turnaround with time to spare, as Venom only started filming a year before it debuted.
As Deadline notes, Fox had its own untitled Marvel X-Men movie scheduled for the same October date; that said, by now the project is thought to have been cancelled.
Second up, and releasing July 10, 2020, would be Morbius (per Variety), Marvel’s take on vampirism.
It’d see Leto, Joker in Warner Bros’ DC Comics movie Suicide Squad, as a scientific genius whose attempt to treat his own blood disease turns him into the Living Vampire.
Daniel Espinosa of Ryan Reynolds movies Life and Safe House would be directing from a script by screenwriting pair Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who wrote Dracula Untold and The Last Witch Hunter before moving on to Gods of Egypt, Power Rangers, and Netflix series Lost in Space. — AFP-Relaxnews
