Did Covid Cut Carnage Short? A ‘Venom 2’ Deep Dive
Pandemic-related budget issues may be behind the 90-minute runtime
The first time I saw Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021, dir. Andy Serkis), I immediately noticed that something was up with the film’s editing. The pace was way too fast, the cutting too erratic and distracting. The experience as a whole reminded me of the one I had while watching Aeon Flux (2005, dir. Karyn Kusama), a picture known to have been butchered against the wishes of its director in post-production.
Rejecting the official claim that Carnage was always intended to be around 90 minutes long, I will make the case that Venom 2 ended up at this length because its post-production was disrupted by Covid, which increased the costs of completing the VFX-heavy picture and reduced its box office potential.
To clarify, I am not claiming that the film necessarily has a longer director’s cut or that it was re-edited by the distributor against the wishes of the filmmakers. Rather, I want to delve into the actual causes of its conspicuously short running time and so show how external circumstances contributed to the theatrical cut’s assemblage.
Table of ContentsThe Official Story
Venom: Let There Be Carnage is, without a doubt, an unusually short film for a sequel to a VFX-heavy blockbuster like Venom (2018, dir. Ruben Fleischer, 112 minutes). Typi-cally, blockbuster sequels are larger in scale, and thus tend to carry longer running times than their predecessors. But despite having more characters, a (slightly) bigger budget, and over 100 more VFX shots, Carnage is 15 minutes shorter than Venom.
So, it was unsurprising when its length became a subject of discussion online and in the press. One couldn’t help but wonder: “Why is the film that short?”
When asked, the filmmakers tended to create the impression that the 97-minute duration was intentional, repeatedly attributing the length to desire to make Carnage a super-fast film comparable to a ‘rollercoaster’ or ‘thrill ride.’
“"No, it was actually always going to be...we always wanted this film to be a real thrill ride. And a fast, muscular...not hanging around too much with exposition.””
Source: Andy Serkis, Instagram interview via IGN, about 14:30
Tom and I, right from the get, knew we just wanted this to be an epic ride from beginning to end. We wanted to leave you breathless at the end of it as if you had literally just been on a roller coaster and came thinking that was the most insane batshit ride you’ve ever been on. This movie goes like a freight train and I don’t know that you could sustain much more of that ride if you went longer.
Source: Kelly Marcel, Discussing Film interview
“ We wanted to do more with [the sequel]… and bring it in under 90 minutes so it's a ride and a thrill.”
Source: Tom Hardy, Syfy Wire interview
Director Andy Serkis, screenwriter Kelly Marcel and actor Tom Hardy all thus seem to agree that the film couldn’t or shouldn’t have been any longer than 90 minutes (sans credits), that its duration is the deliberate result of their creative intent.
If you ask me though, they’re selling a narrative, perhaps one designed by Sony to create the public perception that there was no trouble whatsoever with Carnage behind the scenes.* But the fact is that Carnage definitely had some trouble.
*And that’s understandable. As a rule, when a new movie comes out, you don’t want to badmouth it. You don’t want to kill its chances at finding an audience or making money. You don’t want to destroy all the hard work the cast and crew have put into it. You don’t want to ruin your professional relationships and so damage your career in the process. Regardless of what happened behind the scenes or what you personally feel about the end product, you put on your happy face and you do your best to sell it. And maybe you do get more honest and candid about things, but some time after the the fact.
The Disruption of Carnage
With a reported budget of $110 million, Carnage began shooting mid-November 2019, with principal photography ending towards the end of February 2020. Just as it was about to enter post-production, the March 2020 COVID-19 lockdown began, separating the filmmakers geographically and forcing them to adopt remote work-from-home protocols. All post work on the film, including editing, music, color grading, and VFX, now had to be conducted under these conditions.
The film’s post schedule consequently was considerably longer than planned. Origi-nally, it was to last about 6 months. Delivery was to occur in August 2020 in time for the picture’s October 2, 2020 release date. Instead, it would stretch to approximately 18 months, with Carnage being delivered in September 2021 in time for its London premiere on September 14 before its main release on October 1, 2021.
In large part, the year-long delay is attributable to Sony’s reaction to the unpredic-table developments in the Covid pandemic. Carnage first got pushed to June 2021, then to September, and finally October.1 It follows that the film’s post schedule changed several times as well, which would in turn have influenced how long the film was worked on and the shape of the final theatrical release.
Lending particular insight into the complications of the post process under Covid is a pair of behind-the-scenes articles that detail the making of the film’s VFX, which were spread among several different teams, including an in-house team, DNEG, Framestore, and Image Engine. Here are some quotes from the picture’s main VFX Supervisor Sheena Duggal from Mike Seymour’s article in FX Guide.
On the delivery:
“The production, the crew, and the scheduling for our film got completely messed up by COVID, as most productions did,” says Duggal.
On working from home:
“Due to COVID much of the project involved working from home across multiple time zones. The team used a variety of tools including emails, iMessage, whatsapp, Clearview, Evercast, Zoom, Aspera, Microsoft teams, Slack, Shotgun/Shotgrid, Q-take, PIX x2x, Moxion, RV, Cinesync, and Streambox.
On the demands of the project:
“The project was extremely demanding but the team did adapt thanks to persistence and practical intelligence. “I haven’t looked at this recently but by October 2020 I had read 22k emails and sent 6K,” comments Duggal. “That was almost a year ago so I can only imagine it’s triple that by now.”
Source: FX Guide, October 24, 2021.
Now, here’s an excerpt from Ian Failes’ article in Before and Afters.
“…Duggal and her visual effects producer Barrie Hemsley were forced to completely re-think the way post on Carnage would be approached…. The task was enormous; reviewing thousands of shots, remotely, while setting up a technical workflow for that to happen… Then there were also the artistic, creative and personal challenges remote working brought.
“It was especially difficult to hold together a cohesive vision across thousands of artists each in their own bubble all around the world… I had to give a lot more feedback than I normally would expect to, and while we pulled off a very successful film, I feel there are still inconsistencies with the quality as a result of this challenging scenario.””
Source: Before And Afters, October 22, 2021.
A good example of how unexpected complications arose in the course of remote work can be seen in a DNEG featurette on the film. At 8:13, VFX artist Spencer Cook discusses an issue DNEG had in reviewing VFX shots remotely:
“We also discovered something odd when we reviewing the lip sync shots with the clients because the post-production on this movie was done completely during the quarantine so everybody was working remotely and we noticed there was a slight lag in the review sessions and it made it impossible to judge if the lip sync was in sync or not cause everybody’s lag was probably a little bit different in all the different locations.”
He adds that they were not aware of this problem for a long time because
“…working remotely was kind of new for all of us and we were kind of figuring all this out and making a movie remotely was just kind of crazy but we did it, but… these were the kind of things that would just come up and that we would learn for the first time.”
As the various departments do not work in a vacuum and decisions in one area (such as the editing) can influence those in another, it can be inferred that the issues described here were not limited to the VFX area but affected all of post-production, which was considerably more challenging and complicated than it would be normally.
Initially, there was no established workflow that allowed the crew to manage things quickly and effectively. Many participants were caught off-guard and had to adapt to new circumstances on the fly, such as having to deal with different time zones, internet connectivity issues, and communication platform availability.
Consequently, the overall amount of work necessary to coordinate and finish the film was magnified. This, in conjunction with the fluctuating post and release schedules, was almost certain to have some sort of effect on the film’s budget.2
Unplanned Expenses
Covid in general has been known to really drive up costs and budgets of in-production titles. For the most part, this occurs due to the effect the quarantine has on filming. If you have to stop and restart production, you’re gonna have to cover associated overages, not to mention the new costs of Covid - hiring testers, making sure people mask and distance, paying extra due to the inflation of physical materials, etc.
Carnage was fortunate, insofar that filming had already been completed before the pandemic. Now, I’ve found no real information about the specific effects of Covid on post-production costs. And there have never been any reports of Carnage going over budget. But it’s hard to believe that there were no side-effects at all.
Imagine you’re a producer at one of the companies that finances a blockbuster film with a budget of around $110 million. You’ve allotted the film a certain amount of money for development, for shooting and for post.
The film finishes shooting and is (presumably) on time and on budget. But then the post-production schedule that you’ve planned and budgeted for goes out the window because of external factors that nobody had predicted.
Putting aside that unplanned developments can easily waste money, the amount left for post-production now has to be re-allocated to factor in the new circumstances.
Maybe you need to pay certain departments more money due to the people having to work longer. Maybe you need to pay other departments less because nobody will need to travel. Maybe the VFX artists now need to be paid extra for unexpected overtime. In any case, much like in the case of filming, it is almost certain that after Covid, the money that you have now is simply worth less than it used to be, if just by a little.
One post-production area where the movie would definitely have unexpected additional expenses is that of reshoots. Now, we can safely assume that Venom 2 would have planned for reshoots and so budgeted for them in advance, since that’s simply par the course for Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking nowadays.
However, nobody planned for reshoots to happen under the new Covid filming guidelines. This means any additional filming would cost more than the pre-lockdown projections. In at least one case, unanticipated VFX work was required due to the fact that the main cast were separated geographically and had to film the same scene, with all of them being spliced together into the sequence digitally later.
“An added challenge came from some additional photography acquired during the lockdown in the UK, NYC and Toronto. “Our actors were in different countries although sometimes acting in the same scene,” outlines Duggal. “So we did a lot of previs and techvis to figure out how best to shoot. I was lucky to have the help of first-rate additional VFX supervisor Marty Waters, who was our shoot supe during principal photography and helped supe in post, and he was local to the UK, for that shoot. Andy Serkis is based in the UK so that made it easier for that part of the shoot.”
Source: Ian Failes, Before And Afters, Oct 22 2021
A sequence confirmed to have been added in reshoots was an early minute-and-a-half scene between Eddie Brock and Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham), where the latter briefs Brock about Cletus Kasady wanting to see him, which then leads to Eddie having a talk with his symbiote Venom in a bathroom.
The sequence came about at the insistence of editor Maryann Brandon, who was felt that Mulligan needed a proper introduction scene as she felt confused by his appearance after watching an early cut of the picture. As Venom appears in his ‘wraith’ form, the new scene required expensive VFX work.
“In fact, there was no backstory when I first started for the Mulligan detective character. When they first showed me the film I was like, “I don’t know who he is.” And then Andy Serkis explained to me who he was and I said: “Okay, so, you’re gonna need to shoot a scene so I know who he is when he’s waiting outside the prison for Eddie to come back….”
We went back and shot that scene at the very beginning where he’s saying “Cletus wants to talk to you” and in this scene where Eddie has a fight with himself in the bathroom…. And again, a very expensive scene to do because Venom is not a cheap character.”
Editor Maryann Brandon, Rough Cut Podcast interview, Jul 16, 2022.
The thing about VFX nowadays is that even under the best circumstances on a production of this scale, it ain’t cheap. And any previously annacounted-for VFX work would definitely eat into the available post-production budget.
Adding new, un-filmed scenes in other words could potentially take away money from other scenes that had already been shot. So, completing Carnage was almost certain to cost more than projected prior to the beginning of the lockdown.
Under these circumstances, the studio (by which I really mean the different companies or entities responsible for the financing of the film) would have to make a choice between increasing the film’s budget and so expanding its scope and running time, or cutting the movie down to make it fit the budget available.
I strongly believe that the latter is what happened in this case.
Evidence of Budget Issues
Now, of course, running time is in constant flux as a cut takes shape, with decisions by directors and editors being made, unmade, considered, reconsidered. The shape in of a picture’s assemblage can be influenced by numerous factors.
Of them, however, budget is one of the most important. It’s not uncommon for entire scenes or sequences to be jettisoned in editing just because there is not enough money in the budget to complete them. And sometimes you can tell from what you see on-screen, such as when the editing becomes visible and draws attention to itself.
For instance, in the first major action sequence of Carnage, wherein the red symbiote busts out of prison, there are clearly missing shots in-between parts of the same scene. Here, I want to point readers to the following video by The Nerd Network which provides a close reading and analysis of the entire sequence.
The author begins by looking at the initial Casady transformation scene and points out that that moments of his transformation are clearly skipped over, creating continuity issues:
“Cletus’ transformation for the most part has been these tiny fleshy tendrils starting to grow out of his torso, but then that all fast forwards to a shot of a clawed red arm reaching towards the warden, which is funny because the last shot we saw of that arm was where it was strapped down on a table. How did the arm get out of the straps? … There’s no shots that show this happening, so it leaves sharp eyed viewers in the dark about what’s happening. You can tell something is missing here.”
He then looks at Carnage’s rampage through the prison, pointing out how the cuts jarringly jumps from one location to another, making it almost impossible to follow the onscreen action. I appreciate in particular when he points out how the movie cuts nonsensically from a moment where Carnage is looking from an elevated position at a group of cheering inmates to suddenly turning into a tornado in a completely different part of the prison, with no consideration for spatial continuity.
The sequence was evidently chopped up and connective tissue that showed Carnage tracking down the warden, leading into the moment where he turns into a tornado, was cut in-between. One can infer that the sequence initially was - and should be longer - by at least several seconds, if not a full minute.
I’d say the sequence more than one occasion has instances akin to jump cuts - abrupt transitions between shots in the same sequence that disrupt continuity editing and make the subject jump from one place to another.
Something similar happens later when Carnage busts Shriek out of the mental hospital. At 52:43-52:45, we see Carnage in his ‘wraith’ form use his tentacles to break down a doorway from inside Shriek’s cell and fling away multiple doctors and guards trying to stop him. But at 52:46, the sequence suddenly cuts to a wide shot of Carnage, now apparently in his full form, where he is one with Cletus, moving quickly through the hallway while holding Shriek with his tentacles, already outside the cell.
I’ve made a .gif to illustrate this:
The cut is again jarring and can qualify as a jump cut as there isn’t enough material in-between to properly connect the moment of Carnage moving down the hallway with what we saw just a second ago - Carnage inside the cell.
What do all the missing shots in these sequences have in common?
Well, they would clearly require more expensive VFX work due to their featuring Carnage, who is an all CG character. And this indicates that the cuts were likely made to save on money, as their absence hurts the sequences’ continuity and the legibility of the film’s storytelling. If the latter were the priority here, then the sequences would’ve almost certainly been longer and more elaborate.
Editor Interview on Carnage
That the picture had budget-based cuts is backed up by an interview with editor Maryann Brandon, conducted by Matt Fury for the Rough Cut Podcast. About 16 minutes in, Fury asks Brandon about the film’s short runtime and wonders if this was due to the picture having to cover less backstory than the first movie.
Here is the relevant passage from Brandon’s response:
“ I don’t think there was a plan for it to be 90 minutes, I don’t think it had anything to do with telling the backstory… I think at the end of the day it ended up being about 90 minutes because, first of all, I don’t pay attention to runtime, I kinda cut the film and… if it needs to be tight, I tighten it, if it needs breathing room, I let it breathe and… that’s what it came out to be. ”
Here, Brandon indicates that the film’s running time was not necessarily intended but rather was arrived at organically in the course of editing.
Brandon then specifically links the editing of the film to the fact that Venom and Carnage are both fully CG characters, who need to have actual scenes of character interaction in addition to action sequences, which poses a challenge in terms of sustaining a film’s storytelling and in terms of budget. She states:
“And especially with Venom, because both Venom and Carnage are full CG characters, and… I’m not sure how long… you can sustain full CG characters… You need them to talk to each other to tell story, can’t just have punch-punch, hit, blam. And also, those shots are expensive to make. So, for 90 minutes there’s a lot of bang for your buck in there.”
Brandon then goes on to note that things are different from a fully animated film, where everything is CG. She seems to mean that the film was short in part because it was rather expensive to have fully-animated characters interact on-screen for extended periods of time in a live-action picture. Yet tellingly, the attributes the brevity to specifically the picture’s writing, to the absence of ‘more scenes’ between the characters, which implies the film was already written to be short and not have much interaction between its CG characters on the page to save money.
“And I think in particular Venom… if it were an animated film, every single frame would be CG and you’d plan it out and you’d have storyboards and… you’d have characters that talk to each other, but because this is live action simulation and live action, either you have to write more scenes that are without the characters when they’re just themselves… and there wasn’t more scenes to write because… I think you got the story between Carnage and Eddie and I didn’t feel and I don’t think the writers or producers or director felt that there was much more you needed to know between them. And… I just don’t think it could’ve been longer.”
However, a little later, after Fury asks about how knowing that editorial changes can affect costs on a VFX-heavy movie impacts her decision-making process as an editor, she admits to sometimes making cuts specifically due to budget issues.
She begins her response by recounting a story of how she worked on Star Trek Into Darkness (2013, dir. JJ Abrams) with (presumably) VFX Supervisor Roger Guyett.
“I remember on Star Trek Into Darkness there was a scene… that was very heavily CGI and it was way too long and Roger and I were putting our heads together and I came up with one version and he was like. ‘Okay, Maryann, you just added like two million dollars to the budget, we can’t do it. And I was like, oh, ok, I get it now.
So, sometimes if I get that kind of feedback, like ‘we just can’t afford it, can you come up with a better way or shorter way or a less expensive way to tell a story,’ you know, it’s a challenge and I’ll do it. And I did.
We cut out a fight and we rejiggered some stuff around and we had to come in at a certain budget and that’s the fun part, you get to rewrite it, and hopefully it’s better. It’s always easier I find to work within the parameters of something than to just have everything. It’s like at the blank page, it’s like ‘oh, shit, now what do I do?’ Whereas, like, the parame-ters are ‘you can have this many shots,’ it helps you kind of think with a goal in mind.”
Now, I’d say Brandon is trying to be careful with her words here and so doesn’t specify whether it was on Star Trek or Carnage that she indeed had to find a shorter, less expensive way to tell a story and that “we had to come in at a certain budget.”
But even if she’s not talking about Carnage directly, her admission here about needing to make budget-based cuts and the context surrounding this response at the very least strongly imply that this did indeed happen on the Venom sequel.
Reading between the lines then, Carnage too was made within certain parameters, and there was a limited amount of VFX shots that the final cut could ultimately have due to their expensiveness, all of which impacted the editing of the picture.
Budgets, Cuts and Expectations
Altogether, these details indicate that the 97-minute runtime at least in part resulted from the need to keep the film’s budget down, that certain shots or scenes were dropped simply because the budget was not high enough to afford them.
Even prior to the pandemic, such budget-based cuts were possible, considering that Carnage had a budget about half that of the average summer blockbuster ($200-250 million) and was made under the tenure of Tom Rothman, who was reportedly hired in 2015 by Sony due to his ability “to work with multiple production labels and turn out blockbusters, while maintaining tight control over expenses.”*
*Rothman is currently chairman of Sony Picture Entertainment’s Motion Picture Group. Per Brandon, he also looked at cuts of Carnage and made various suggestions in the course of editing, though it’s not clear to what extent he was involved.
After Covid then, they were only more likely to happen, for the longer the theatrical release was and/or the more VFX shots it had, the more it would cost. Indeed, consider how much more expensive Carnage might’ve turned out to be if it had been as long as the first Venom. The final cut of Carnage has 1323 VFX shots over the course of 97 minutes, resulting in an average of 13.64 VFX shots/min. At this rate, a 112-minute cut of Carnage would need around 200 additional VFX shots.
I doubt any of the financiers, especially Sony, would be willing to pony up the money necessary to pull that off, even if that made for a better film, especially given that Covid had also reduced the film’s box office potential.*
*At the time the film was to come out in October 2021, theaters were not allowed to seat their maximum capacity due to social distance protocols. Moreover, audiences were still hesitant to return to theaters in general due to the need to crowd with strangers for an extended time. The distributor reportedly assumed that the picture would open with only about $40 million domestically yet it actually ended up grossing $90 million in the first weekend.
Given all these circumstances, mandating a short final running time would simply be logical from the studio’s perspective. So, though there’s no definitive proof at the moment that a longer cut of the Venom sequel was desired by the filmmakers, there is enough evidence to suggest that the 97-minute theatrical cut was not intended creatively from the outset, but was rather the end result of the picture needing to be completed under unprecedented circumstances that nobody had planned for.
In other words, the 90-minute duration was moreso the result of business-driven decisions rather than artistic ones.
For sure, I think that keeping the movie fast-paced was a priority for Serkis et al., but I doubt anyone involved wanted the end result to have storytelling this rushed or cut-ting this frenetic and immersion-breaking, especially considering how comparatively better edited and easier to follow both the first and third Venom movies are.
I hope one day then we get to see what Carnage could’ve been, had its post-production not been disrupted, had the filmmakers not been forced to make additional, unforeseen compromises as a result of external factors.
But what about you?What did you think of Carnage and its editing? Is it legible and easy to watch? Do you agree that its duration was the result of budgetary issues? Do you think the filmmakers in reality wanted a longer cut? Would you be interested in seeing it? Please,
Even then, the release date was fluctuating. In August 2021, Sony was reportedly planning to delay the film from October 15, 2021 to January 2022, but relented after seeing the box office results of recent releases like Shang-Chi. In the end, the picture got moved up by two weeks to October 1, 2021.
One question that interests me here: was it the changing release date that impacted the post schedule? Or was it the post schedule that led to change of release date? After all, it’s possible that the sheer amount of work that needed to be done to finish the film under Covid may have led to some of the delays.
It's amazing this exists.
I will say that, even considering the limitations, I do think the FX people on these "Venom" movies did a terrific job. Both Venom and Carnage, in spite of everything, really seem like they physically exist within the spaces of those movies.
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