The Twelve Days of Wu-Mas 2025 - Day #9

The story goes like this: actor Tom Hardy has always been a fan of hip hop, underground hip hop in particular, and was particularly fond of this crew who named themselves Czarface, a comic book alien ambiguously-motivated hero-type, created as a love letter to the type of superheroes and supervillains rappers Esoteric and Inspectah Deck, along with producer DJ 7L, grew up reading about. Tom Hardy was the lead (and producer) of the film version of Marvel villain-slash-antihero Venom, an antagonist of Spider-Man comprised of a human man and an alien symbiote who grafts onto him in order to survive, but slowly begins shifting Brock's personality. That synopsis reads more horror-thriller than its execution, which ran with the whole "Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man" aesthetic, adopting a sarcastic tone with occasional extreme violence to keep the teenage boys off their goddamned phones for a moment.

Anyway, Venom was so successful that Sony Pictures commissioned a sequel, one for which Tom Hardy would continue to be a producer on, except now with much more authority to make creative decisions, such as influencing who gets included on the accompanying soundtrack. This is how Czarface made it to Hollywood, an event believed to be so unlikely when the crew originally linked up but now just seems like it was always a foregone conclusion, an event memorialized by the Good Guys, Bad Guys EP, a vinyl-exclusive extended version of a single of the same name released to streaming at the same time as the movie. The Czar boys may have been so thrilled that they extended an invitation to a certain actor to participate, as well...

Click here to catch up with my thoughts on the Good Guys, Bad Guys EP, a Patreon-exclusive write-up that has now been unlocked and is available for subscribers at every tier, including "free". Enjoy!

-Max