'Venom Carnage' Is Rumored Title Of Spider-Man Spinoff

There's some big movement going on in the Spider-Man series at Sony as the studio preps a new female-led film based around a Spider-Man character. While we don't know which character will lead that film, there are two other Spidey spin-offs reportedly still in the works at the studio. One is Sinister Six, which Drew Goddard is scheduled to make for a 2016 release date. And the other movie is a Venom spin-off which now reportedly carries the title Venom Carnage.

Deadline mentions the title in passing, and says that Alex Kurtzman and Ed Solomon are still scripting, with Kurtzman still set to direct. (Kurtzman also has a Mummy film to make for Universal.) The reported release window is 2017, which would put Venom Carnage out in the same year as the female-driven film.

Carnage, as Marvel fans will know, is a nod to a character who was created using the same concept of the alien symbiote that is part of Venom's origin. But whereas the human host for Venom was a guy with some problems, the host who becomes Carnage is a total psychopath. So whereas Venom was originally sort of a villainous version of the symbiote-bonded Spider-Man, Carnage was in turn a hyper-evil version of Venom.

The human host for Carnage, Cletus Kasady, was introduced in 1991, with the fully-enabled version of Carnage appearing in Spider-Man comic pages in 1992. The two characters have often been paired, and even starred together in a Peter Milligan-scripted series, Venom vs. Carnage, in 2004.

If Deadline is correct about the Venom spin-off title, that answers a long-standing question about whether or not Carnage will appear in the film.