Despite terrible reviews (29% on Rotten Tomatoes), Sony’s“Venom” grossed more than $854 million worldwide. Now "Venom" creator Todd McFarlane is saying critics just didn’t get it. Speaking to Yahoo, McFarlane, a world-reknown comic book creator responsible for Venom, and Spawn, believes that critics just needed to embrace their inner teenage fanboy.
“I think at times … the critics get it wrong in that they forget their age. They come in, and they’re 42 years old, and they come in with their attitude and they’re going, ‘Stop it.’ What if you were 16 and you were watching this movie? You would love it,” said McFarlane.
“[‘Venom’] delivered everything it was supposed to. It was gnarly, it was nasty, it has a big cool Venom, which was what I was looking for. [That] was my bias — I just wanted to see the visualness of Venom that I had created 30 years prior,” he added.
However, McFarlane does admit that Topher Grace playing Eddie Brock/Venom in “Spider-Man 3" was dead-wrong to the spirit of the character:
“When the Topher Grace character turned into Venom, he didn’t really add a lot of weight,” said McFarlane. “I intentionally made him bigger because I always wanted it to feel like Peter Parker/Spider-Man was going up against an elephant and there was no way he was ever going to push him over. So he was going to have to come up with another way to trip up the elephant, which was gonna be to use his brain instead of his brawn.