Ruben Fleischer’s Venom was a surprise hit in 2018—the surprise coming from the fact that it wasn’t great, that it was a Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man, and that star Tom Hardy seemingly used the movie as an excuse to try out another weird and mumbly voice—and now a sequel is on the way from director Andy Serkis, who knows some things about CG creations like Venom. The sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, will feature the big-screen debut of Carnage, the extremely edgy ‘90s comic book character who was introduced at the height of Venom’s popularity and is so hardcore that he makes a violent antihero like Venom look like a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man (and he makes a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man look like Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers in A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood). Where Venom has long black tentacles and frequently eats people, Carnage is a serial killer who likes to turn his tentacles into swords and axes and other weaponry.
The first trailer for Venom: Let There Be Carnage showed off more of Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady (a.k.a. the human version of Carnage, which is an alien symbiote like Venom), after first teasing his appearance in the post-credits scene of the original film, and this new trailer spends more time letting Carnage embrace his namesake with his some wanton death and destruction. That trailer and this one also spend more time playing up the buddy comedy-esque relationship between Hardy’s Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote, which was one of the things people seemed to like the most about that first movie.
In addition to Harrelson and Hardy, the Venom sequel features Naomie Harris as Shriek and Stephen Graham as a cop. The film will be in theaters—and only in theaters, as the marketing campaign has proudly insisted—on September 24.