Comic-Con: Tom Hardy's dark and gritty 'Venom' promises a film with 'no heroes'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Tom Hardy reveals the 'Venom' within himself at last Tom Hardy's new "Venom" trailer finally shows the alien.

Look out, Tom Holland. Tom Hardy’s looking for a fight.

Hardy gave the crowd a good look at his alien-powered title antihero in "Venom" (in theaters Oct. 5) during a Sony Pictures panel at Comic-Con. And because Spider-Man and Venom are famous foes from comic books, the subject arose of whether Hardy is ready to tussle with Holland’s Marvel Cinematic Universe web-slinger.

"I’ll have a go, yeah," Hardy said with a big smile. "He’s an awesome actor and I’d love to work with him and I love Spider-Man."

"Venom," however, is a movie with "no heroes," promises director Ruben Fleischer ("Zombieland"). New footage that debuted at Comic-Con showed how a genius billionaire named Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) looks to space to save humanity and melds alien symbiotes with human beings to create a higher life form. One of these symbiotes gets attached to down-on-his-luck investigative journalist Eddie Brock (Hardy), creating a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation where Brock has superpowers and a snarling, fanged alter ego.

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Brock "finds his perfect opposite and partner in this huge creepy alien beast who arrives and lives rent-free in his body, and no one will believe it’s there," said Hardy, who has been a longtime fan of Venom. "I don’t want to upset anyone but I think he’s the coolest Marvel superhero there is."

Hardy said a big influence in taking the role was his son Louis, who is a "massive" Venom fan.

"I really wanted to do something my son could watch. A lot of the films I’ve done are normally pretty aggressive or violent or I swear a lot. This is one where I bite people’s heads off," Hardy said, laughing. "So it’s for the best of intentions."

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Spider-Man isn’t Venom’s biggest adversary in the film - that honor goes to another symbiote known as Riot. "Symbiotes can jump from different hosts (but) in our movie you never quite know where Riot’s going to turn up," said Fleischer, who thinks it’d be "pretty amazing" to see Spidey and Venom throw down on a big screen. "At some point down the road, they’re going to run across each other’s paths."