Knull’s Creators Would Like Fair Compensation, Please

In just over a month, Tom Hardy will do the symbiotic boogaloo one last time in Venom: The Last Dance. The threequel’s new trailer provided a tantalizing glimpse of recent Venom comics baddie Knull, and for fans of those comics, one thing is on their mind: did the villain’s creators get their due, financially?

The answer to that question is depressingly (and repeatedly) no. Knull was created by Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman fairly early into their Venom run back in 2018, and his whole deal is that he’s the creator of the Symbiotes (aka the Klyntar) and a powerful cosmic god known as the King in Black. After his brief appearance in Last Dance’s trailer, both Cates and Stegman tweeted about his inclusion. Despite not knowing this was happening beforehand, Stegman joked that Marvel’s big fat check would help him “finally be able to afford that lazy river moat around my house.” As for Cates, well, he made his thoughts on the matter pretty clear.

lol pic.twitter.com/VLKtdhmG9N

— DONNY CATES (@Doncates) September 12, 2024

If you don’t know, comic creators famously do not get financially compensated well (or really, at all) for when a comic character gets adapted to a movie, show, or so on. These are work-for-hire gigs, and things aren’t really skewed in their favor, as Marvel artist Jen Bartel recently discussed in relation to Marvel Snap. At most, they show up to the film or premiere, or get a thanks and mention in the credits, but not always. Last year, for example, Insomniac Games infamously didn’t credit Cates and Stegman for the elements of their Venom run usd for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Cates later said he read Last Dance’s script and is seemingly positive about whatever direction things are headed. “It’s so much bigger, so much more ambitious than you could imagine,” he said of the film. “There’s a movie being made where a character Ryan and I created is fighting a character Todd McFarlane created. […] Nothing is going to rob me of thinking that’s fucking rad.” And in regards to Knull specfically, he teased: “Holy shit. That’s how you treat a king.”

Does this mean Knull’s going to make his way over to the MCU side of things and cause problems for Tom Holland and whoever’s playing Venom over there? We’ll (probably) find out more when Venom: The Last Dance hits theaters on October 25.

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