If you haven't seen Venom yet, be warned, there are spoiler ahead. After the film ends, and Venom defeats Riot, a mid-credit scene teases a sequel. Eddie Brock, reestablished as a journalist, finds himself beckoned to a jail cell to interview a mass murder. Sitting in the cell, wearing a red wig, was Woody Harrelson. As Cletus Kasady, Harrelson will bring Carnage to life. In the comic books, Carnage is Venom's biggest rival. After defeating Spider-Man easily, Peter Parker makes a truce with Eddie Brock, and the two team up to stop Carnage.
Venom director Ruben Fleischer sat down with IGN and touched upon casting Harrelson as Carnage, and the reason for putting him aside for a sequel. "We’d like to think that this movie will expand to other movies and Carnage is, I think, the most beloved of the Venom adversaries, with the exception of probably Spider-Man," Fleischer revealed. "And so we definitely didn’t want to include Carnage in this first movie because it felt like we wanted to establish Eddie and Venom and so that’s why we worked having Riot as our main adversary. But the intention or the ambition was to show that there are legs for the franchise in that a fan favorite let alone played by Woody Harrelson would be something we could look forward to in the future."
Fleischer also praised Harrelson's role in Natural Born Killer, and claimed that was the inspiration for the casting. "When you think about a guy named Cletus, and off the comic book pages what he might be like, this insane serial killer, if you think about Woody in Natural Born Killers and the menace that he brought to that character, I think it’s really exciting to think about him going to that darker place again," Fleischer explained. Venom versus Carnage will be a highly anticipated sequel.