Source:Edward Douglas

April 9, 2009

A few weeks back, ComingSoon.net/Superhero Hype! had the privilege of visiting the set of Sony's upcoming horror comedy Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. While we can't talk just yet about what we saw, we did get to spend a good 45 minutes with the film's co-writers and executive producers, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, both cool guys who are clearly fans of genre. With that in mind, it was exciting to know they were working on the first draft for Sony's planned "Spider-Man" spin-off movie Venom, and we had to try to get in a few questions about that.

The duo actually went to Sony with a pitch for their take for the popular Spidey villain, but couldn't really say too much about it due to the usual non-disclosure agreements anyone involved with such a high profile project for Marvel would probably have to sign.

"Venom is something that we're very fired up to be writing," Reese told us. "We have turned in a draft and are waiting to hear back, so it's early in the process. But it's a thrill to be writing 'Venom' for obvious reasons."

As far as what they looking for, Reese did say that they had to follow "certain parameters" or the "47 rules" as Wernick called them.

"Obviously, with a character like Venom there's a ton of stuff to draw from," Reese told us. "Then they had specific rules about the villain and the backstory and stuff like that, so there were certain things they wanted us... certain parameters they gave us. But largely we pitched them something and they liked it but they had changes, so we worked on the outline for a long time and then we wrote the script. So with Marvel and Sony and us it's definitely very, very collaborative."

They couldn't talk about whether they were going to ignore everything that happened with the character in Spider-Man 3 or start fresh for reasons mentioned above.

They're also working on a project with Universal called Earth vs. Moon, which also sounds like an exciting idea for a film. Reese told us a little bit more:

"It's a science-fiction epic war movie ala, I don't know, 'Braveheart.' It's sort of got a little 'Star Wars' in it, a little 'Braveheart,' a little '300' in it. It's like it's sort of exactly what the title suggests. It's big and crazy and it's gonna be awesome. It's a colony on the moon, and the colony on the moon is fighting Earth. We're very, very excited about it. We've also turned in a draft on that and are waiting to hear back, so we're in early stages on each of those."

Look for more about our visit to the set of Zombieland over on ComingSoon.net and ShockTillYouDrop.com sometime in the near future.