Warning: Full spoilers follow for Venom: The Last Dance.
The eternal irony of the Sony Marvel movies – a.k.a. Sony’s Spider-Man Universe – is that in a Hollywood where interconnected superhero worlds are a dominant force, the Spidey spin-offs that make up Sony’s slate really have very little to do with one another. And while most of those films have bigger problems beyond how they do or don’t connect to one another, in the case of the Venom trilogy – the, I suppose, crown jewel of the SSMU? – the lack of connective tissue to Spider-Man’s world has always been glaring.
The new and apparently final film in the Venom trilogy, Venom: The Last Dance, doubles-down on the “no Spider-Man” stance. And while there are many possible reasons why there’s never been a Tom Hardy/Tom Holland Venom/Spidey crossover – ranging from creative decisions to legal or contractual ones to maybe even the politics of the relationship between Kevin Feige’s Marvel Studios and Sony – the funny thing is, the previous Venom movie and the previous Spider-Man movie each seemed to finally be setting up a connection between the two universes. But that set-up is just hand-waved away in The Last Dance as if to say, “Oh, you fans thought we were gearing up for something big? Nahhhh.”
2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage featured a post-credits scene where Hardy’s Eddie Brock/Venom was somehow seemingly transported to the MCU. Once there, the bonded pair see on TV that J. Jonah Jameson has revealed Peter Parker’s identity to the world (from the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home), and Venom licks the screen right where Spidey’s face is, saying “that guy.” The symbiote was clearly very interested in Peter for some strange reason.
Seemed like Sony setting up a face-off to me!
Two months later, Spider-Man: No Way Home was released, and in that film’s post-credits scene we saw Eddie/Venom’s very brief trip to the MCU already come to an end. Following directly on the Let There Be Carnage scene, Eddie/Venom is sitting in a bar talking to a bartender (Ted Lasso’s Cristo Fernández) about all the “super people” who live in this universe. “Maybe I should go to New York and speak to this Spider-Man,” he says, before suddenly being magically transported away… but not before leaving the smallest bit of Venom symbiote on the bar.
And that seemed like Marvel Studios getting Hardy out of the MCU as fast as they could.
It was also the last time we saw Eddie/Venom before The Last Dance, and in fact, they’re still in the MCU at the start of the new film. The above bar scene is even replayed for us, but it’s a condensed version that’s missing some important bits. While the “purple alien who loves stones” is still mentioned in The Last Dance, the other “super people” talk is not, and most notably there’s no mention of… Spider-Man. The line about Eddie/Venom going to New York to find the wallcrawler is also gone. (Venom even makes a crack about being sick of the multiverse before they depart.)
The funny thing is, The Last Dance does feature a recurring thread about Hardy’s character(s) wanting to get to New York. Only now it’s not to find Spidey, but rather because the symbiote has always wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. One can almost see an earlier draft of the script being about the pair trying to get to Manhattan to find Spider-Man, as was previously set up in not one but two different post-credits scenes, but then the decision being made that, “Eh, we’re going in a different direction.” And who doesn’t want to see Lady Liberty in person, anyway?
Fernández’s bartender turns out to have a Venom universe counterpart (you can tell them apart because the Venom world’s guy has long hair!). And indeed, he figures in The Last Dance’s post-credits scene, though it’s unclear what that will really add up to, if anything. Earlier in the film, Eddie/Venom left a small part of the symbiote in the bar, just as they had in the MCU. So perhaps that will lead to some new take on Venom for Sony? But what about the bit of symbiote left behind in the MCU? At the rate that Marvel has ignored post-credits scene revelations in recent years, I wouldn’t be surprised if we just never hear about it again.
My colleague Tom Jorgensen (who reviewed Venom: The Last Dance for IGN) pointed out that it would’ve been cool for Eddie to finally make it to New York at the end of the film, only to see the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man swinging across the skyline. Fans have long speculated that the Hardy Venom movies are set in that world. So even if Tom Hardy never made another appearance as Venom, that could’ve been an interesting way to close out his story. His Venom never met Spider-Man, but Spider-Man does exist there after all.
But instead, it just feels like Sony has closed the door on the MCU after teasing what could’ve been.