You’d be forgiven—given the fact that roughly nine million superhero movies, some of them upwards of eight hours in length apiece—have come out since, but Sony’s Spider-Man-without-Spider-Man movie Venom was actually something of a big deal at the box office last year. Directed by Ruben Fleischer, and starring Tom Hardy and Tom Hardy Doing A Very Spooky Voice, the film made $855 million during its time in theaters—not billionaire playboy Peter Parker money, but still pretty dang good.
So it was pretty obvious that Sony was going to be making a sequel to all of the original film’s brain-chomping weirdness—a whole cinematic universe, in point of fact, with Jared Leto’s vampire-themed Morbius out next summer—but the studio has run into a minor problem: Fleischer is pretty busy right now, working on Zombieland: Double Tap. And so Variety reports that the great Venom 2 Director Hunt is on, with folks like Andy Serkis and Bumblebee director Travis Knight (both of whom having pretty much proven their CGI motion-capture bona fides at this point) in the running. (Captive State’s Rupert Wyatt, too.)
Current speculation is that the film is being aimed at an October 2020 release date—Sony’s got an untitled superhero movie set for then, and who better to fill it than the sexual goop man and his handsome reporter friend?—so they’ll need to get a move on pretty soon. There’s no word yet on what sort of story the sequel might cover, but Fleischer’s old buddy Woody Harrelson popped up at the end of the first movie to play the human host of alien psychopath Carnage, so that seems like a pretty potent hint.