How ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ Leaves Room For The Next Dance

This story contains spoilers for Venom: The Last Dance.

It’s the end of the road for Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and Venom. The final installment of the Venom trilogy, Venom: The Last Dance, marks the end of Sony’s most successful non-Spider-Man-related franchise—at least for now. While The Last Dance does end in a way that feels conclusive, it leaves the door ajar just enough for potential future stories drawn from the Spider-Man universe across both Sony’s live-action Spider-verse projects and, perhaps, the MCU too.

Let’s start with the latter as a way to build to the former. Despite much speculation that it would be otherwise, The Last Dance does not walk back the events of the Spider-Man: No Way Home post-credits sequence. If you stuck around for the final moments of Tom Holland’s most recent Spider-Man outing—which established that Spider-Man characters from multiple past iterations of the franchise share a multiverse, and under certain circumstances, can hang out and do whatever—you’ll recall that Eddie Brock shows up in the main MCU and has a conversation about Thanos and the Infinity Stones with a bartender played by Ted Lasso’s Cristo Fernández. After standing up and declaring he’s drunk, he’s quickly transported back to his dimension of origin, the Sony Universe—but not without leaving behind a bit of the Venom symbiote behind in Holland’s world. The Last Dance replays this scene and picks up with Brock back in his universe’s version of that same bar, with a frustrated Venom declaring he’s tired of “multiverse shit.” Before the two set out on the road trip that makes up the bulk of the film, Eddie leaves payment for the bartender (also played by Fernández), along another trace of symbiote residue.

We later see Chiwetel Ejiofor capture this lingering piece, which reflects the scene in the trailer we discussed a few months ago. So, in a bit of a bait and switch, Sony made it look like they were walking back the No Way Home tag as a marketing tactic, but the final film confirms things as they are: There’s still a bit of Venom lingering in the MCU for Kevin Feige and crew to deploy whenever the narrative timing is right.

The Last Dance offers insight into possible future narratives, whether they are Spidey-focused or otherwise. The crux of the plot involves Venom and Eddie trying to ensure that the villainous Knull (Andy Serkis) doesn’t escape from the prison Venom and the other symbiotes created. When Venom sacrifices itself at the end of the film, it’s presumed that Knull’s attempts at getting out are over—until a post-credits sequence undoes that, with Knull boasting that despite this presumed setback, the “King in Black” is awake and incoming.

Comic book fans will know Knull finally arrived on Earth in the King in Black crossover event from Donny Cates, Ryan Stegman, JP Mayer, Clayton Cowles, and Frank Martin. Positioned as a primordial force more powerful and consequential than Galactus, Knull required the entire Marvel universe of heroes to band together to take him out. In short, he’s probably too overpowered to be dispatched by Venom. But that means he’d make a great foe for a crossover!

Where this crossover may or may not happen is a little up in the air. There’s a chance he could make his way over to the MCU side of things, especially after Holland called the idea for the next Spider-Man movie “crazy” and “a little different” from previous films. Could Knull be the big bad in a Sony-verse team-up film? Could anti-hero characters like Morbius and Kraven put aside their ways to fight Knull? Could Juno Temple’s Agony symbiote that she’s bonded with at the end of The Last Dance join into the fun? It’s frustratingly unclear, the opposite of how the MCU lays out its plan years in advance. Regardless, the nomenclature of The Last Dance is a red herring, indicating by the time it's all done that the symbiote side of Spider-Man’s universe is just getting started.