Tom Hardy cast as Venom in Sony's Spider-Man film

The film is scheduled for release in 2018

Tom Hardy is returning to the world of comic books and superheroes to portray another iconic villain: Venom.

Years after portraying “the Breaker of the Bat” Bane in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, Hardy is now stepping into the symbiote suit to portray Eddie Brock in Sony’s Spider-Man-based film, Venom. The studio announced the casting in a black-and-white image on social media Friday with the actor donning a T-shirt emblazoned with the character’s pearly whites.

Venom was recently scheduled for release on Oct. 5, 2018, and Sony also announced a fall start of production.

Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland) will direct Venom, which is being produced Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, and Amy Pascal, with Palak Patel and Eric Fineman overseeing for Columbia Pictures. Plot details on the film are still under wraps, but this is promised to be a part of Sony’s Marvel Universe and not a traditional spin-off.

Venom has been portrayed both as a villain and an anti-hero. The alien symbiote needs a human host to survive, one of them being Eddie Brock. A former writer for the Daily Globe newspaper in the comics, his career was destroyed after he published a series of stories debunked by Spider-Man. So, clearly there’s some animosity there.

Hardy now succeeds Topher Grace, who played the character in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten also played the character in an unofficial black-and-white Venom short film from Joe Lynch.

Sony struck a deal with Disney’s Marvel Studios to bring Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe of the Avengers, which introduced Tom Holland as Peter Parker. The actor gets his first solo outing as the character in this summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, dropping July 7.

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