There are Spider-Man movies and then there are movies in the franchise known as Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. What makes Spider-Man movies in this latter category interesting is that they don’t have, well, Spider-Man in them. Due to longstanding rights issues and a shared custody agreement that lets Tom Holland’s web-slinger fight crime in the Disney-owned MCU, Sony has made several additional live-action movies starring second- or third-tier Spider-Man characters rather than Spidey himself so as not to dilute the main Spider-brand. It’s a curious creative decision, resulting in films like Morbius and Madame Web that are infamously baffling failures. But one SSU movie has worked—and it’s worked well enough to get two sequels, including one that just hit theaters. Why does Venom work when the rest of the SSU doesn’t?
Venom: The Last Dance, out Oct. 24, is the follow-up to 2018’s Venom and 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Both of those films were the seventh-highest-grossing movies of their release years, so clearly something is working with this mini-franchise, which stars Tom Hardy as reporter Eddie Brock and as the voice of Venom, an alien Symbiote who has bonded with Eddie. As the title implies, The Last Dance is supposedly the final film in the trilogy. Morbius and Madame Web, meanwhile, both struggled at the box office, received terrible reviews, and will not be getting sequels no matter what the post-credits sequences may tease.
Of the three Spider-Man supporting characters featured in these movies, it’s kind of surprising that Venom is the one best able to support more than one film. When Venom first appeared in the comics back in 1984, he was little more than an all-black palette swap of Spider-Man’s typically red-and-blue costume. Eventually, the alien that gave Peter Parker this new look and extra strength would appear as a standalone villain in his own right, but Venom’s whole deal is that he’s basically a dark Spider-Man doppelganger. That should be hard to pull off in a movie that doesn’t acknowledge the existence of Spider-Man, and yet Venom succeeds where Morbius and Madame Web—Jared Leto’s vampiric superhero and Dakota Johnson’s clairvoyant seer—stumble. You’d think those characters would have an easier time in a Spider-less universe.
It helps that Venom has a name recognition that his SSU counterparts don’t. With the possible exception of Harley Quinn, Venom is probably the most famous comic book supervillain to arise in the past 40 years, and the first Venom movie could coast on this and tell a story about alien goo and the intrepid, squeaky-voiced reporter who happens to come in contact with him. That Venom looks like Spider-Man is never acknowledged. Morbius, meanwhile, sold itself with trailers featuring Spider-Man graffiti that doesn’t appear in the actual movie and made a bunch of fuss about a post-credits scene involving Michael Keaton’s MCU baddie the Vulture that ultimately didn’t make any sense nor amount to anything. Madame Web, in addition to generally making viewers concerned there’s a gas leak, contorts itself around Spider-Man’s absence. Three supporting characters are legacy, second-wave Spider-Man characters, even though Peter Parker is a baby when the movie takes place. (Peter’s full name is never uttered. It’s very weird.)
For the most part, Venom doesn’t trouble itself with Spider-Man. There are some allusions to Eddied getting run out of New York at the start of the 2018 film, a wink to the character’s comic book storyline, and the Symbiote recognizes Spidey during a multiverse-hopping post-credits scene that connects to Spider-Man: No Way Home. But even that latter overt connection is in the service of a gag more than any real canon-building. Instead, the Venom films find a center that Morbius and Madame Web lack in the connection between its main characters. The plot of all three movies is basically nonsense, the villains utterly forgettable with the possible exception of Let There Be Carnage’s titular villain, played by Woody Harrelson. But all three Venom movies are buddy comedies that take knowingly silly steps into romance territory as Eddie and his superpowered parasite Venom get into all sorts of antics together. It’s The Odd Couple, but one of them is made of living goo and he bites people’s heads off.
People aren’t coming to see a Venom movie because they want complex superhero lore or to puzzle out phantom connections to Spider-Man; they’re here because they want to see Tom Hardy do some whack stuff with his silly, foul-mouthed dark passenger. The breakout scene of the first film was when Eddie, going kinda nuts during the early days of his partnership with Venom, took a refreshing bath in a posh restaurant’s lobster tank. Let There Be Carnage memorably had Eddie and Venom’s many tentacles trying—and largely failing—to make breakfast. There are dance scenes, silly throwaway dialogue, and lots of charmingly dumb action in the Venom movies, but they all center around the surprisingly concrete relationship between a man and his Symbiote.
It shouldn’t be taken for granted that this is a normal thing for a series of movies to center themselves around. Eddie and Venom’s relationship is goofy bordering on insane, and the limitations do indeed start to show in The Last Dance. The new movie assumes that the audience is fully in the tank (lobster or otherwise) for these two, and if your enthusiasm for their brand of bickering and humor is waning, there’s not much else to offer. The villain, Knull, is a distant imprisoned threat who sends monsters after Eddie and Venom while they do shenanigans in the Nevada desert and encounter Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple in Area 51. Rhys Ifans is an alien-loving hippie in a van with his granola family? It’s a lot that doesn’t add up to much now that audiences have already danced with Eddie and Venom twice before this.
And still, even if Venom has run out of steam, you can see why these characters had real appeal in a way that Madame Web can only be enjoyed ironically (a good time, but not at all a “good” movie). In a franchise full of Spider-Man wannabes, the one most associated with Spidey ended up being the most successful because it was about a true connection rather than tenuous connections between multiversal IP.
There’s a third SSU movie coming out this year, Kraven the Hunter. It stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a Spider-Man villain whose whole thing is being a big game hunter. Now I’ve been burned before, but I’m cautiously optimistic about this one, because Kraven could just be an excuse to provide killer action sequences featuring a man with vague animal powers. That’s a far cry from Eddie and Venom’s bromance, but at least it’s potentially exciting. If you don’t have Spider-Man in your Spider-Man movie, you need to have something else.
