New Venom Trailer: Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock Goes To The Ultra-Dark Side

They are Venom — and they are 50 shades of frightening. 

Sony Pictures just dropped a new trailer for its Ruben Fleischer-directed not-quite-a-superhero superhero film Venom. 

The footage, which you can watch in full above, dives deeper into the backstory of central character Eddie Brock — the disgraced photojournalist played by Tom Hardy – who sticks his nose in places it shouldn't be and whose drive to dig up purposefully hard-to-reach dirt has dire consequences.  

"I always seem to find myself questioning something the government may not be looking at," Eddie says in the trailer. "I found something really bad. And I have been... taken." 

Then enters Riz Ahmed's Dr. Carlton Drake, the Life Foundation leader who uses his specialized knowledge in symbiotes to conduct experiments he believes will save the planet from collapsing into total chaos. We see shots of various other men twitching and writhing while symbiotes take over their bodies. In voiceover, Dr. Drake opines, "Human beings are disposable. But man and symbiote combined? This is a new race, a new species. The higher life form."

The trailer shifts to focus specifically on Eddie being "taken" by Venom and struggling to fight against the entity who wants him to hurt people just for the thrill of it. But try as Eddie might, he isn't strong enough to resist Venom's pull, and so he succumbs to the dark side. 

And man, is it pitch-black on that end of the spectrum. 

Now functioning as the single shared being, Venom spreads his sticky tongue all over a man's face after snarling, "Eyes, lungs, pancreas. So many snacks, so little time." The creature then proceeds to take down a group of cops, choke out a doctor, and promises to eat a man's limbs and face to turn him into an "armless, legless, faceless thing ... rolling down the street." (Sheesh, little harsh there, Venom.)

This new trailer seems to match up nicely with the description of the footage that was shown at the Venom panel during San Diego Comic-Con 2018. There's extra symbiotes worming their way into the bodies of innocent humans, there's Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock sprinting through a forest and later quipping to a store owner that he has "a parasite" that's making him appear as a fanged monster bent on ripping people to shreds, and there's the battle between Venom and the villainous Riot, the entity first introduced in Venom: Lethal Protector #4. (Surprise! Dr. Drake gets snatched up by a symbiote, too!)

The only thing not seen in this fresh Venom footage is Woody Harrelson's mystery character, which many believe to be the serial killer Cletus Kasady, better known as Carnage. Seeing as though the film won't feature Venom and just one other symbiote, we feel pretty confident in the chances that Harrelson really does portray Carnage and that the monster-murderer will eventually go head-to-head with Venom in all-killer, no-filler fight to the finish. 

Also starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate, Venom will launch on October 5.