On Thursday, Sony released the teaser for Venom, the upcoming origin movie based on the titular space goop turned Spider-Man foe. The clip gives us our first look at Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock, the journalist who becomes the vigilante antihero, but the teaser is missing one major thing—Venom himself.
The minute-and-a-half-long teaser gives us a lot of explosions and disconnected action shots, capped off with a shot of Brock waking up in an MRI machine after the unseen accident that bonded him with a space symbiote and turned him into Venom.
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“Everyone’s got their thing—maybe it’s a breakup, a death, an accident,” Hardy says in the trailer’s narration. “Whatever it is, you used to be on thing. Now, you’re something else. We all have our own problems, our own issues, our own demons.”
The teaser trailer is full of emo narration about Brock’s “demons,” but sorely lacking the actual demon himself. The closest the clip comes to actually giving us a look at Venom is a quick shot of the black symbiote writhing in a container and, later, a split second of the symbiote creeping up Brock’s neck as he struggles in the MRI. The teaser ends with some wisps of smoke that briefly form the distinctive eyes and mouth of Venom before disappearing into the darkness.
This is only a teaser trailer, of course, and we’ll probably get to see Venom in all his freaky-tongued glory when the full trailer eventually drops. Until then, at least we have enough footage of Hardy to prove he’s going to make a better Brock than Topher Grace.
Venom was directed by Ruben Fleischer, the guy who made Zombieland, and stars Michelle Williams, Jenny Slate, and Woody Harrelson alongside Hardy. It’s unclear whether Tom Holland’s Spider-Man will make an appearance—but we’ll just have to wait until the film’s October 5 release to know for sure.
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