The third Venom movie hits theaters everywhere tomorrow, and in this Spider-Man adjacent Sony Marvel release, we see the hopeful end of this franchise. Don’t get me wrong, Venom is the alien symbiotic embodiment of intrusive thoughts and has his endearing qualities. But this movie, just seemed forced from the first scene on.
If you haven’t seen the first two Venom films, it’s time to brush up on them, because without those you’re going to be missing a lot of context. Including some that help with the first twenty minutes of the movie. It opens with scientists studying and testing on symbionts in a hidden facility deep below Area 51. Where did this come from? How did we get there? The movie picks up after a Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) bonus scene. If you missed that, you’re going to be a bit confused. It’s easy enough to pick up while watching the movie but some context is helpful going into the story.

There’s a lot going on in Venom: The Last Dance. Area 51 is being decommissioned and destroyed, while this secret lab continues to do research, Eddie and Venom are on the lam, and now there’s an alien that suddenly wants a codex that’s inside Venom and Eddie so he can break out of an alien prison. There are almost too many parts moving in the movie, maybe it is to keep the story flowing, maybe it’s to keep your interest on the screen so you won’t notice the reused footage, or maybe it’s they threw everything at the wall to see what would stick and just kept it all.

But even with all of that happening, the movie tosses in a weird other group to worry about – a traveling hippie family who’s on the Alien Road to see Area 51 before it’s gone and hopefully encounters aliens along the way. This seems like an attempt to put some humanizing factors in the story since the scientists, aliens, Eddie, and Venom are all so disconnected from it. But they chose an extreme to include and these people are so disconnected from reality that they just wander on a military base to see what they can see. Even if this decommissioning wasn’t actively happening the base would be highly guarded and they at least would have been quickly arrested, if not shot on sight. But instead, they mindlessly climb a lookout tower to look around – which of course puts them in harms way for the over-bloated fight scene at the end.
While technically Venom is part of the Marvel world, he, like other characters sit in the grey area that is the Sony Marvel releases. With the exception of the Spider-Man and Spider-Verse releases, these characters seem to be getting lackluster releases. It does try to connect itself a bit to the MCU by mentioning Thanos (that purpled alien) and the snap, plus has a moment in the multi-verse – but even that is done sloppily.
At one point in the movie, Eddie mentions that it’s been the worst year of his life having Venom with him, giving us a timeline overall for the three films. Is this a mistake? Are we all to believe that the three movies and their events all happened within one year? And the reference to Thanos and the Snap, that all happened at the same time? But the MCU itself shows that the results of Thanks and the Snap happened over a longer period of time when people returned. So there’s a major disconnect happening even in that part of the story.
Now Venom: The Last Dance is nowhere as bad as Madame Web, it seems to be missing a lot of elements that will give this movie staying power or will make fans happy they spent their movie money to see it. Instead, even with a 1 hour 50 run time, the final credits are a good fifteen minutes of the showtime. If you take out the reused scenes and the twenty minutes you’re going to need to figure out what’s happening in the beginning of the movie, there really isn’t too much meat to the movie.
So is Venom: The Last Dance the last in the movie franchise? The logline does say it’s the final in the trilogy. But the extra scenes after the movie and the final credits leave it pretty open-ended. There’s always a chance they’ll bring Venom back again in one way or another to try to keep this franchise alive. But is it worth it? Is there enough of a fan draw to bring a fourth movie to the screen? I guess the box office numbers are going to be the only ones that will truly decide that, especially if fans are willing to sit through another padded movie.
Venom: The Last Dance is in theaters everywhere this weekend.
Overall Rating
About Venom: The Last Dance
In Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance. Venom: The Last Dance stars Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach and Stephen Graham. The film is directed by Kelly Marcel from a screenplay she wrote, based on a story by Hardy and Marcel. The film is produced by Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal, Kelly Marcel, Tom Hardy and Hutch Parker.