How VENOM Factored Into The Designs For AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

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I recall watching the third act of Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War and thinking, “Those henchmen alien thingies look an awful lot like Venom.” And it turns out I wasn’t alone!

Infinity War concept artist Jerad Marantz has revealed that there was some internal concern about similarities between Thanos’ Outrider army and the famous Spider-Man foil.

“I loved designing the Outriders. It was a real challenge,” Marantz says in the book Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War- The Art of The Movie. He goes on to acknowledge the concern about their look being reminiscent of Venom and his other symbiote friends, “After looking at the source material, I wanted them to have a biomechanics quality to them. There was concern that the Outriders may look too much like a Venom symbiotic, and the challenge was to ensure they had a unique look.”

The way he attempted to address those similarities is by adding more of an armored, mechanical look to their design.

“To achieve that, I decided to go biomechanical with them and incorporate the same shapes that are used in Thanos’ armor and Proxima Midnight’s and Corvus Glaive’s,” Marantz revealed.

ComicBook.com provided this look at some of the concept art Marantz worked on, so you can see how they worked to avoid the resemblance:

If you ask me, they could’ve done more to distinguish the look of the Outriders from that of Venom, because I still thought- for a second- that Infinity War was showing us how the symbiote aliens arrived on earth as a way to set up Tom Hardy’s Venom movie before I came to my senses and realized it was merely a coincidence.

But what do you think? When you saw them, did you think of the symbiotes made famous in the Spider-Man mythology? Did the Infinity War design team do a good enough job making them look different? Let me know!

SOURCE: ComicBook.com