The third film in Sony’s money-spinning Venom franchise has been delayed by four months due to the actors’ strike.
The actors’ strike that has shut down the majority of US production for the last few months appears to be drawing to an end (with a deal struck late last night), but things haven’t resolved quickly enough to save Venom 3′s spot on the 2024 summer release slate.
The Tom Hardy-led movie was originally set to debut on 14th July next year as a prime summer release for Sony.
However, production was only a few weeks in when the actors’ strike began and as such, Sony have been forced to push Venom 3's release back to 8th November, 2024. The film now takes the slot of an as yet unannounced Sony/Marvel film, while also joining the swollen ranks of big splashy summer blockbusters that won’t be appearing next summer, as was originally intended.
We’ve already seen Sony push one of its other ‘Spider-Man adjacent’ films into next year, that being Kraven The Hunter.
As every studio races to get its projects back into production and grab spots on the 2024 and 2025 release schedule, we can already envisage how the coming months are going to be a headache for studios to schedule, creating a production logjam that we’ve seen all too recently following the shutdown caused by the pandemic.
Still, that late year release spot has worked for the Venom movies in the past: both previous films debuted in October and made buckets of cash. By taking a spot that it had already reserved for another unnamed Marvel film, Sony has likely already wrapped up deals to screen Venom 3 on lots of premium format screens – an important element of a film’s drive for increased revenue.
We’d imagine that this date should hold but things are so turbulent right now, who can tell? We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it.
