FADE IN:

EXT. CLIFF CAVE, COSTA RICA

A HELICOPTER deposits sickly JARED LETO and a handful of MERCENARIES in front of a CAVE on a CLIFF.

JARED LETO

Okay, here we are at this remote, perilous location so I can get me some vampire bats!

MERCENARY

Question: why did we have to come to such an inconvenient place to get an animal that can be found in most countries across South and Central America? Heck, it probably would have been cheaper and easier to just buy a crate of them online.

JARED LETO

I guess the audience just has to assume that this one cave is home to a specific kind of magic vampire bat that I learned about somehow, not that we ever say any such thing. Now you big tough mercenaries are free to go, me and my skinny anaemic arms will be fine to collect the hundreds and hundreds of bats.

MERCENARY

How, exactly? I can’t help but notice you don’t have any nets or cages or equipment of any kind except for some weird goo-dripping device which appears to do nothing at all. And once we leave in the helicopter you won’t even have transport.

JARED LETO

It’s okay, I’ll just cut myself to draw out the huge swarm of bloodsucking parasites, then we’ll jump into a flashback before anybody can think too hard about what the hell is supposed to happen next.

INT. CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, GREECE

YOUNG JARED meets YOUNG MATT SMITH in a RESEARCH HOSPITAL for KIDS WITH BLOOD DISEASES.

YOUNG MATT SMITH

Hi, my character name is Lucien. My equivalent from the comics is called Loxias, but I guess they thought that sounded even more stupidly made-up and over-the-top evil than “Doctor Morbius”.

YOUNG JARED LETO

So you have the same debilitating blood disease as me, huh? So I guess you’ll wind up taking the same experimental cure as me, and getting the same superpowers as me but you’ll use them for evil, and then I’ll have to fight and kill you in the climax.

YOUNG MATT SMITH

Yes, we have in fact clumsily telegraphed all of that in the first three minutes of the movie.

The BLOOD MACHINE that YOUNG MATT is hooked up to suddenly malfunctions, and YOUNG MATT starts to die! YOUNG JARED quickly fixes it and saves his life, impressing DOCTOR JARED HARRIS.

JARED HARRIS

Wow, other Jared, you’re a scientific genius! Somehow nobody noticed this until just now! I want to send you to a special school.

YOUNG JARED LETO

But that would mean leaving Matt behind! He’s like my brother!

JARED HARRIS

You met him about an hour ago and didn’t bother to learn his name.

YOUNG JARED LETO

Yes but dramatically it works better if he’s like my brother, so even if I’m self-contained and aloof, and he’s kind of an asshole, he’s gonna be like my brother all right?

INT. LAB

Back in the present, JARED is working in a lab with ADRIA ARJONA.

ADRIA ARJONA

Congratulations on winning the Noble Prize, Jared. Yes, we’re introducing a brilliant medical researcher by having her mispronounce “Nobel Prize”. But did you have to tell the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to go fuck themselves in your speech?

JARED LETO

Pfft, what do those ivory-tower eggheads know? Yes I may have invented a synthetic blood substitute which has “saved more lives than penicillin”, but that was just an accidental discovery while I was trying to cure my own illness, which I still haven’t done, so as far as I’m concerned that was all a bullshit waste of time!

ADRIA ARJONA

Ah, so the only life that our hero thinks is worth saving is his own, that’s good to know. At any rate, I’m really not sure about your latest experiment, with the vampire bats.

JARED LETO

Wh-what? How did you know about that?! That was supposed to be a total secret that nobody in the lab ever suspected!

Rolling her eyes, ADRIA points three feet over to the ENORMOUS EIGHT-FOOT-WIDE AND TWENTY-FOOT-HIGH TRANSPARENT CYLINDER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM, FILLED WITH WITH HUNDREDS OF FRANTIC BATS.

JARED LETO

Oh yeah, I guess that’s a bit of a giveaway.

(sheepish shrug)

So sue me, I’m doing some illegal bat experiments. I just figured, vampire bats EAT blood, I have a disease IN my blood, so if I shove some bat DNA into myself then I should be cured. SCIENCE!

He injects some BAT DNA into a lab rat, and it immediately DIES. But then moments later it UN-DIES.

JARED LETO

Hooray, it worked! Now I can do the same procedure to myself!

ADRIA ARJONA

Really? You don’t want to do more than one single test before you move on to human trials? Like, what do you even mean “it worked”? Did that rat have the same super-rare blood disease as you, and you can tell on sight that it’s been cured?

JARED LETO

I think I just mean it worked as in the rat didn’t die all that much.

ADRIA ARJONA

Shouldn’t you at least observe it for a while to see if there are side effects? I mean, given what we see later, I’m pretty sure you just created a superhumanly strong flying rat that feasts on the blood of other rats.

JARED LETO

While that sounds AMAZING, I can’t be bothered to stick around and see if it happens. To international waters!

(grabs science, sprints out of lab)

INT. SHIP

JARED and ADRIA enter INTERNATIONAL WATERS on a SHIP staffed entirely by SCUZZY MERCENARIES.

ADRIA ARJONA

I think this experiment is a bad idea, Jared.

(straps him to chair)

You’re meddling with forces you don’t understand. I think this could all go terribly wrong, in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine.

(pumps him full of bat juice)

I sure hope my dropping everything and risking my career to help you do this isn’t sending an inconsistent message here.

The SERUM turns JARED into a HIDEOUS GNARLED MONSTER! He immediately starts EATING the crew of the SHIP.

JERK MERCENARY

(throat getting torn out)

ACK!! OH WELL GOOD THING THEY VAGUELY REFERENCE THAT WE’RE ALL TERRIBLE PEOPLE IN SOME WAY OR OTHER

ASSHOLE MERCENARY

(being ripped in half)

YEP WITH ALL THE MONEY JARED’S THROWING AROUND YOU THINK HE COULD HAVE GOTTEN ANY NUMBER OF DECENT RELIABLE SAILORS TO DO THIS, BET HE’S GLAD HE HIRED ONLY VICIOUS CRIMINALS NOW

ADRIA ARJONA

And I’m glad that while consumed by an irrational bloodlust, Jared’s conveniently only killing the mercs, and leaving the totally vulnerable love interest who’s just lying there alone.

Eventually JARED’S kill frenzy ends, and he reverts to a more muscly version of his normal self.

INT. LAB

Back in his LAB, JARED explores his new condition.

JARED LETO

Now I have to eat blood to survive. I can get by on the Mountain Blast Powerade-colored fake blood I invented, but that’s getting less effective with time, and I will be forced to resort to drinking real blood in roughly UNKNOWN weeks and NOT SPECIFIED days!

He takes a swig of FAKE BLOOD, trying to suck it right out of the IV BAG like it’s a JUICE BOX or something, I mean maybe consider keeping it in a thermos buddy.

JARED LETO

On the bright side, whenever I drink my Smurf juice it gives me a vaguely-defined collection of random superpowers! Super strength! Sometimes super speed, kinda! Almost flight, ish! A really useless-seeming version of sonar! Occasionally I can climb on walls a little, and once or twice I appear to teleport like Nightcrawler? I dunno! Best of all, I have these squiggly vapor trails whenever my powers activate, which hopefully helps to conceal how terrible my special effects look!

He steps into the BAT TUBE and lets the BATS FLAP ALL AROUND HIM in a shot directly copy-pasted from BATMAN BEGINS.

JARED LETO

Also, now the bats see me as one of them, so they’re my friends! See how they swarm all around me without eating me? That would never have happened before I had my bat powers!

BAT

We did this exact thing on that cliff in Costa Rica. It was the first thing that happened in the movie.

JARED LETO

Whatever, the point is that I’m basically a vampire, except with the vulnerability to sunlight and holy water and so forth swapped out for generic superpowers. In fact the only downside to my condition is the powerful thirst for blood OH SHIT ON A STICK I’VE TURNED MYSELF INTO A TWILIGHT VAMPIRE, FUUUUUCK

MATT SMITH hobbles in, dyingly.

MATT SMITH

All right, the Eleventh Doctor joining forces with the TVA, this ought to be fun! Let’s go fix that spacetime continuum!

JARED LETO

I think you’ve mistaken me for a different Marvel character.

MATT SMITH

What?

(checks movie title)

Oh. Would you look at that, there’s an R there. Well that’s extremely disappointing. Fine then, just hand over that blood disease cure I funded.

JARED LETO

No way, man! You don’t want it! It’s bad! It’s not a good cure! You should go drop dead rather than become as vigorous and healthy-looking as I am!

MATT SMITH

Okay uh, maybe you could explain what you’re talking about? You know, actually tell me about the blood frenzy thing in detail, so I understand exactly why taking the cure in its current form is a terrible idea?

JARED LETO

Nah. I’m just gonna continue yammering vaguely about how it’s a curse and you shouldn’t take that incredibly dangerous, monster-creating serum that I’ve left sitting out on that bench over there. It will ruin your life and you should never go near it, not even when my back is turned. Oh wow, I never noticed how fascinating the wall over here is, I should peer intently at it for the next minute or so!

(stares)

INT. LAB LOBBY

The next day, JARED is walking out of the LAB when he is met by police detective TYRESE GIBSON.

TYRESE GIBSON

Last night a nurse was eaten in your lab, just like those mercenaries on the ship. But this time it’s worse because the nurse was not an asshole!

JARED LETO

Oh, well, it clearly wasn’t me then because my blood mania conveniently only targets human trash so I can continue to be nominally the hero. But anyway you obviously don’t have enough evidence to arrest me at this stage, so the most discreet course of action would be to calmly answer your questions and RAHHH

He HULKS OUT and SUPER-PARKOURS to the ROOF, because that is clearly the OPTIMAL ESCAPE ROUTE. But once up there he is hit by the WIND.

JARED LETO

Oh no, this breeze is threatening to blow me away like a piece of paper! Because one of my bat powers is being uncontrollably weightless or something? What the hell is even happening right now?

TYRESE GIBSON

Freeze, Jared! I climbed those fifteen flights of stairs in the past forty seconds and now have a gun pointed at you!

JARED LETO

Crap! I guess I should evade him with my super-speed, then parkour my way back down the building and get out of here. That, or go quietly and be stuck in a jail cell without my supply of blood. Either works.

INT. JAIL CELL

Later, MATT visits JARED.

JARED LETO

Wait, they let a civilian come right into my cell with me?

MATT SMITH

Weird, right? I was even able to bring a bag of human blood in with me, and I feel like that would have to be contraband in some way or other. Welp:

(breaks walking stick over knee)

(does handstand pushups)

(cartwheels out door)

JARED LETO

Hey, waaaiiit a minute...

He eats the BAG OF BLOOD to SUPERCHARGE HIMSELF, rips open the JAIL WALL and chases down MATT.

JARED LETO

You’re the one who killed that nurse!

MATT SMITH

That’s right, I took the bat potion and now I’m a vampire too, as I can prove by making a goofy monster face straight out of a YouTube screamer video! If you think this face looks dumb, don’t worry, I only do it another four hundred times.

JARED LETO

But unlike me, you’re actively going out of your way to murder people! Why?

MATT SMITH

Because I’ve always resented being weak, so now that I’m strong I’m going immediately mad with power as we one-dimensional supervillains like to do.

JARED LETO

Oh well, not an especially original or interesting motivation, but at least it’s coherent-

MATT SMITH

Also I LOOOVE YOU and want to KIIILL YOU and frame you for murder so you’ll be my best friend and JOIN ME in something or other, LET’S FIGHT!!

JARED LETO

what

MATT tackles JARED into the SUBWAY and they start FIGHTING with the aid of their SWISHY SLOW-MOTION TERRIBLE CGI. Then the POLICE INTERVENE and MATT starts KILLING THEM INSTEAD!

JARED LETO

Oh no, Matt’s murdering those innocent police officers! I better use my superpowers to stand vaguely offscreen and just wait for him to finish apparently!

Once all the COPS are DEAD, MATT attacks JARED again. But then JARED escapes by jumping in front of a speeding SUBWAY TRAIN, which BLOWS HIM DOWN THE SUBWAY TRACK like a LOOSE PIECE OF LITTER.

JARED LETO

Yep, this is what my flight powers look like. Me just getting blown around by the wind. You know what, fuck this, this is the most aggressively lame flight scene in movie history, my flight powers will never work this way again and consistency can just go eat a dick.

EXT. STREET

ADRIA notices MATT is stalking her for some reason. To evade him she ducks into a STORE, then scurries out and jumps onto a BUS. The person sitting right behind her then reveals himself to be JARED.

JARED LETO

Adria, I’ve been waiting for you. Is what we’re implying, even though you jumped aboard this bus and got into that seat totally at random on a spur-of-the-moment impulse. I need your help, I’m trying to come up with a science way to kill Matt but obviously I can’t go back to the lab.

ADRIA ARJONA

Ah, and as a fellow science person I can help you acquire a new lab to work in, that makes sense.

JARED LETO

Yeah, that’d be a pretty straightforward piece of screenwriting, wouldn’t it? But sweet Jesus you should see the clunky solution we go with instead.

NEARBY GANGSTER #1

BOY LOOK AT ALL THE COUNTERFEIT MONEY WE HAVE.

NEARBY GANGSTER #2

SURE HOPE NOBODY IN THIS CROWDED PUBLIC VENUE NOTICES ALL THESE COUNTERFEIT NOTES WE’RE FLASHING AROUND IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY.

NEARBY GANGSTER #1

NOW LET US RETURN TO OUR SECRET LAB WHERE WE COUNTERFEIT THIS MONEY.

NEARBY GANGSTER #2

I SUPPOSE SINCE WE ONLY USE IT FOR CRIME, SOMEBODY WOULD BE ENTIRELY GUILTLESS IF THEY SEIZED THAT LAB FROM US BY FORCE.

NEARBY GANGSTER #1

SO MUCH SO THAT THEY COULD DISREGARD THE POSSIBILITY THAT THE CRIMINALS THEY JUST BRUTALIZED WOULD IMMEDIATELY TELL THE COPS WHERE TO FIND THAT INFAMOUS MONSTER WHO KEEPS EATING PEOPLE.

JARED LETO

Seriously. Was there not even a second draft of this thing.

JARED goes to the GANGSTER LAB and does some VIOLENCE on the GANGSTERS.

JARED LETO

Boo! Fuck off! You better clear out of here, because I’m Venom!

COUNTERFEITER

Who?

JARED LETO

I have no idea. Seriously, in his last movie Venom got up on a stage, grabbed a microphone, and yelled to a club full of people that he was an alien, and they all just thought he was some weirdo in a neat costume. It’s pretty clear that only about five people in this whole cinematic universe know that Venom exists, and I shouldn’t be one of them.

COUNTERFEITER

So that line was just to try and provide a tiny bit more connective tissues between these otherwise-unrelated movies?

JARED LETO

Yeah, and remind people that Sony is still desperately trying to make this cursed project come together somehow.

He then takes apart the gang’s PRINTING PRESS and rebuilds it into STATE-OF-THE-ART CHEMICAL ENGINEERING EQUIPMENT with his BARE HANDS in FIVE MINUTES, which is a piece of movie inventor nonsense that even TONY STARK would call bullshit on.

JARED LETO

Et voila, I’ve now cooked up a batch of special bat poison! I can use it to kill both Matt and myself!

ADRIA ARJONA

That’s pretty cool I guess... I mean, I’ve seen absolutely no indication that just chopping off Matt’s head wouldn’t have done the trick, but whatever.

INT. MATT’S APARTMENT

JARED HARRIS goes to MATT’S PLACE, where he finds MATT still slipping in and out of his DUMB MONSTER FACE.

JARED HARRIS

Wait, you’re just in your home? Why aren’t the cops bursting in to kill you, then? They already saw security footage of you killing some random dudes, where your face was clearly visible. You know, the extremely distinctive face of Jared Leto’s benefactor and best friend since childhood, who the cops should definitely know about when there’s a huge manhunt for Jared?

MATT SMITH

Plus I’m the guy who visited Jared in jail two minutes before he broke out. Tyrese is clearly completely incompetent.

(makes Baraka face again)

But that’s not the point right now! For you see, another part of my confusing mishmash of contradictory motivations is that of your two surrogate sons, Perfect Doctor Jared Junior was always your favorite!

JARED HARRIS

No, you were my favorite, for some reason! Jared was my pride, but you were my joy!

MATT SMITH

(winces, slumps dismally)

Oof, did you have to remind me how much better our last collaboration was than this colossal piece of shit?

(long sigh)

Oh well, anyway:

(tears Jared Senior’s throat out)

He then LEAVES. Later, MAIN JARED arrives and finds OTHER JARED bleeding out.

JARED HARRIS

Oh good, I’ve been lying here with blood gushing from my massive throat wound for ages. Now that you’re here I can finally die. You have to...

(eyes go blank)

(mouth drops slackly open with lips not moving)

“stop him”

JARED LETO

Wow, that was the fakest-looking ADR I have ever seen. This movie just keeps finding new levels on which to suck, doesn’t it?

Suddenly he is contacted by MATT!

MATT SMITH

Hey Jared guess what, I’m killing Adria to draw you out! Nyah!

JARED LETO

“Draw me out”? It is EXTREMELY obvious that I was going to come after you anyway! I’M LITERALLY IN YOUR APARTMENT AS WE SPEAK, YOU DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO LEAVE THE HOUSE.

He runs up to the ROOFTOP.

JARED LETO

I better use my bat-sonar to x-ray scan the city for their location, which is not even remotely how sonar works!

He flies over to the place, only to find ADRIA lies DYING.

ADRIA ARJONA

Blerk. Cough hack splorgh. It’s too late for me, you should just drink my blood so you’re strong enough to kill Matt.

JARED LETO

Shouldn’t I, a doctor, at least attempt to save your life before jumping straight to eating you? I mean for one thing our relationship, feeble as it is, is the closest thing the movie has to a relatable human element for the audience to latch onto.

ADRIA ARJONA

Well maybe I can accidentally swallow some of your blood and become a vampire myself for the sequel.

JARED LETO

Um, okay... I’m not bleeding, though?

ADRIA ARJONA

Hmm. In that case, why don’t we have one last kiss, during which I can, I dunno, sort of gently bite your lip a little, but somehow firmly enough to break your skin and then a droplet of blood falls into my mouth?

JARED LETO

That sounds like it would be horribly awkward and look ridiculous. Which I guess means it would fit in perfectly with everything else going on around here, so let’s do it!

They KISS, he EATS HER, then he goes to confront MATT.

MATT SMITH

So here we are at last. And this is the climax to what is ostensibly a Venomverse movie, so you know what that means!

JARED LETO

Pitch-dark incomprehensible CGI it is!

They LEAP AT EACH OTHER, then GRAY. SWIRLING, some BUILDINGS, the SKY and NEON LIGHTS then they FALL MAYBE. Then ROCKS? THINGS GO BANG and PARTICLE EFFECTS, there are some ARMS IN THERE SOMEWHERE, the CAMERA spins around some FLYING DEBRIS in SLOW MOTION, oh look now they’re in a sewer.

JARED LETO

All right, time for my finishing move. Remember how I mentioned that bats like me enough to not eat me? Well apparently that means I can magically summon every bat in the city and order them to pin you down for me.

MATT SMITH

Pin me down? I, who can punch through concrete, will be held in place by some flappy little rat things that weigh about thirty grams each? Jesus, it’s a good thing we’ve lowered audience expectations so much that nothing we do can be a letdown.

The BATS hold MATT in place while JARED injects him with the POISON.

MATT SMITH

(dying)

That’s me done for. I guess there’s nothing left but for you to kill yourself as well.

JARED LETO

Oh right, I absolutely said I was going to do that, didn’t I? Because otherwise I’d have to eventually start killing people.

MATT SMITH

Right. Plus now you’re a wanted criminal and everybody you ever loved is dead and there’s basically nothing for you to stay alive for.

JARED LETO

True. So me going through with that whole suicide thing is the only thing that makes any sense. And the only thing that keeps me as a somewhat sympathetic character.

(twiddles thumbs awkwardly)

But see, the thing is, franchise.

MATT SMITH

Oh yeah, that was always the plan, wasn’t it? Like from the beginning? So your whole character arc was badly conceived from the ground up, huh?

JARED LETO

I guess I better come up with some halfway decent justification for why I’m suddenly changing my mind.

MATT SMITH

Or you could just not bother explaining it at all. I mean why put in even the slightest bit of effort at this stage.

(dies)

JARED LETO

Eh, works for me!

(does not die)

END.

JARED LETO

...Well?

Well what?

JARED LETO

Aren’t you going to do the mid-credits sequence?

Aw geez. Could we not? I’m trying my best to pretend that never happened.

JARED LETO

We have to do this, man.

Fine. Suddenly in PRISON, BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH’S SPELL from NO WAY HOME summons MICHAEL KEATON to THIS UNIVERSE from the MCU, which is TOTALLY, ABSOLUTELY, ONE MILLION PERCENT NOT HOW THAT SPELL WORKS.

MICHAEL KEATON

(smirks)

Well well well. Looks like I just got permanently separated from my beloved family who was my entire motivation in Homecoming. Heh heh, sweet.

He then pulls a new VULTURE SUIT out of THIN FUCKING AIR and meets JARED in a FIELD.

MICHAEL KEATON

I’ve been reading all about you. We should team up.

JARED LETO

To be clear, you read all the news stories that explained I was a vicious monster who eats people, and decided that you wanted to join forces with me? Then got in touch with me somehow even though I’m a fugitive from the law, and I agreed to meet with you, some anonymous bird robot dude?

MICHAEL KEATON

Correct. Also something something Spider-Man.

JARED LETO

(smirks)

Well then, my character, the character from this movie that the audience just finished watching, am actually fucking interested for some reason in whatever the hell you’re talking about!

MICHAEL KEATON

(smirks)

JARED LETO

(smirks)

SONY’S RELENTLESS, EMBARRASSING ATTEMPT TO COBBLE TOGETHER BITS AND PIECES OF THEIR ONE MARVEL IP INTO A HALF-ASSED CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

(shatters into a thousand jagged shards of gibberish and bullshit)

END.