Venom, Marvel’s toothy alien symbiote who has been a major character in Spider-Man lore for decades, will once again headline a new movie — but this time, in an unexpected form.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog reports that an animated Venom film is in the early stages of development, with “Final Destination: Bloodlines” directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein attached to produce and direct it. Those guys seem like a great fit — they rejuvenated the “Final Destination” franchise on a big scale in crowd-pleasing fashion, and I’m excited to see how their sensibility melds with this bonkers, often violent, sometimes goofy character.

This new movie, which is still years away, marks the first time Venom will be seen in purely animated form on the big screen (not counting the animation inherent in the CGI required to visualize him in live-action), even though the anti-hero has been a part of multiple animated TV shows, video games, and of course comic books going back to his creation in the 1980s.

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe died after “Kraven the Hunter,” but that doesn’t mean the studio is willing to give up on one of its most valuable assets. The live-action “Venom” trilogy made Sony a boat-load of money — $1.8 billion worldwide — but the comparatively disappointing financial performance of “Venom 3” (aka “The Last Dance”) presented a problem for Sony’s Marvel Universe: With box office numbers dwindling with each successive release, where should they go from here? Now we have the answer, and it appears that a key creative voice behind those movies is coming along on this new animated journey.

THR reports that Tom Hardy, who played Eddie Brock and voiced Venom in all three live-action “Venom” movies, “is understood to be involved in some capacity,” although because the project is still in very early development (it doesn’t even have a writer attached yet), it’s still unclear if Hardy will lend his voice to the character once again, or if he’ll just be involved as a producer, presumably alongside the yet-to-be-confirmed Amy Pascal, Matt Tolmach, and Avi Arad, who have produced all the “Venom” franchise movies thus far.

Less than a decade since its release, a case could be made that 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” is arguably one of the most influential animated movies in history. While it’s been great to see the continuing adventures of Miles Morales on the big screen (with a trilogy-capper still to come), giving other Spider-Man-adjacent characters a similar animated treatment is a smart move that may be able to revitalize a character that seemed to be in a bit of a creative rut.

With the live-action “Spider-Noir” TV show coming soon, movies like “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” in the works, and now this film being added to the pile, things might just be looking up for Sony’s Spider-Man projects after a bit of a rough patch. Fingers crossed this animated “Venom” movie makes its way through the web of development easily.