Venom 2 May Be Rated R Thanks to Success of Joker

Many people were surprised when Sony made Venom that the violent antihero-centered film wasn’t an R. But now the sequel has a chance at getting that rating. Producer Matt Tolmach spoke with CinemaBlend and said that Joker’s $1 billion-plus success means that they are considering the possibility of the sequel being R-rated.

“I mean, I think you always have to think about [it], now that that works,” Tolmach said. “Having said that, our movie worked really well. Our franchise exists as it is, and I don’t think anybody is looking to just say, ‘Hey, they [did it]!’ We have a place in the world. So it isn’t like suddenly everybody’s considering what to do with the rating.”

The sequel will, in all likelihood, be even harder than the first to justify a PG-13 rating with. After all, while Venom is essentially the “Lethal Protector” version of the character, he’s still at least ostensibly a hero of sorts. The sequel on the other hand will pit Venom against Carnage (Woody Harrelson), who dwarfs even Venom’s appetite for bloodshed. Carnage is Cletus Kasady, a deranged serial killer who gets a symbiote of his own. Without Eddie Brock’s relative sanity to restrain him, Carnage will be out for blood and Tolmach noted that Joker proved to executives once and for all that successful R-rated superhero films like Logan and Deadpool weren’t necessarily the exception.

“I think what Joker does is it tells you that you can succeed,” he said. “For a very long time, that was the narrative. And Deadpool sort of wrestled that to the turf, and then Logan, but for a long time, that was considered totally forbidden. … So you know, I think it’s the greatest thing in the world that R-rated movies are being embraced by massive audiences. And it just means that there are more opportunities for that kind of storytelling.”

That said, there is no definitive statement that the film will be rated R and a PG-13 version is almost certainly still very much on the table. We’ll likely know more in this direction in the coming months leading up to the October 2nd, 2020 release.