The first photo of Tom Hardy as Venom is here, and it leaves a lot to be desired

We’ve been incredibly excited about the new Venom standalone film starring Tom Hardy. We first met the character in the, shall we say, unique third installment of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. The character, played by Topher Grace, had so much potential, but got overshadowed in a highly crowded, convoluted film.

Luckily, we’re getting another chance, and will see the character in his own standalone film. It lands in theaters October 5th, and note, though Venom is a character most often seen in the Spider-Man universe, this film isn’t going to be a spinoff or sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming.

If you’ve never heard of Venom before, his real name is Eddie Brock, and he’s a reporter for the Daily Globe. When he encounters an alien life form called a symbiote, his body is transformed into a wall-crawling creature that definitely does not get along with Spider-Man.

While it would be rad for this first look into the film to give us a snapshot of Hardy as Venom, it only gives us a snapshot of him as regular old Eddie Brock.

It’s basically, well, just a picture of Tom Hardy holding a notebook:

So yeah, the picture isn’t that Earth-shattering. However, as Entertainment Weekly reports, the notebook in Eddie’s hands has questions scrawled on it about an organization called “The Life Foundation,” which is a group from the comics that built a bunker to hide from a believed, impending nuclear war in the Cold War era, as well as a group that used the symbiote to create other creatures like Venom. So it stands to reason that Eddie could find himself transformed after digging too deep into a story about the inner workings of The Life Foundation.

Whatever the case, we’re intrigued — and hopefully, we’ll get a substantial look at Hardy as Venom in the near future.