Venom: The Last Dance is a road movie with a monster in the passenger seat, and it ends the way the title promises. Kelly Marcel directs, in her first time behind the camera, and she wrote the script with Tom Hardy. The film runs 109 minutes. It premiered at the Regal Times Square theater in New York City on October 21, 2024, and opened in the United States on October 25. It is the third Venom film, the sequel to Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), and the fifth entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Eddie Brock Is a Fugitive in Mexico
The film picks up with Eddie and the Venom symbiote drunk in a bar in Mexico, just back from another universe. The murder of Patrick Mulligan is all over the international news, and Eddie is falsely branded a prime suspect. He decides to head for New York City to find an old acquaintance who can clear his name.
He leaves a bit of Venom behind at the bar without meaning to. That small piece of symbiote matters later.
The tagline is “‘Til death do they part.” That is not a tease. It is a description of the plot.
A Xenophage Comes to Earth
A creature called a Xenophage is tracking Eddie and Venom. The two try to travel on the side of an airplane bound for New York City. The Xenophage attacks them mid-flight and they drop into the Nevada desert.
Venom explains what is happening. The Xenophages were sent to Earth by Knull, the creator of the symbiotes, to retrieve a Codex. A Codex is forged when a symbiote resurrects its host. Venom revived Eddie once, so the two of them are carrying one now. The Codex can free Knull from the prison the symbiotes trapped him in long ago.
That is the engine of the whole film. Eddie and Venom are not just running from the law. They are carrying the key to a god’s cage.
Imperium Waits at Area 51
Soldier Rex Strickland runs Imperium, a government operation at the site of the soon-to-be-decommissioned Area 51. Its job is to capture and study symbiotes that have fallen to Earth. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Strickland as a commander who is tracking Eddie and trying to capture Venom.
Mulligan, it turns out, survived his encounter with Carnage. Strickland’s people take him. He bonds with one of the contained symbiotes, and Imperium researchers Dr. Teddy Paine and Sadie “Christmas” question him to learn what the symbiotes want on Earth. Stephen Graham plays Mulligan and also voices the unnamed green symbiote he bonds with. Juno Temple plays Paine, a scientist haunted by her brother’s death from a lightning strike that also paralyzed her left arm. Clark Backo plays Sadie, nicknamed “Christmas” by Strickland for her Christmas tree badge.
Mulligan’s symbiote tells Strickland what Knull intends. The Codex can only be destroyed if either Eddie or Venom dies. That is the trap the film sets for itself.
Martin Moon and the Road to Las Vegas
After escaping the Xenophage and Strickland’s team, Eddie catches a ride to Las Vegas with a family of alien enthusiast hippies. Rhys Ifans plays Martin Moon, the patriarch. Alanna Ubach plays his wife, Nova. Hala Finley and Dash McCloud play their children, Echo and Leaf.
This is the best stretch of the movie. The Moons give Hardy someone to play against who is not a soldier or a scientist, and the desert setting does the rest. A film about a man and his parasite running out of time benefits from a little warmth, and the Moons bring it.
In Las Vegas, Eddie reunites with Mrs. Chen, the convenience store owner played by Peggy Lu. Then the ambush comes. Both the Xenophage and Imperium close in at once.
Andy Serkis Plays Knull
Andy Serkis plays Knull, the creator of the symbiotes, who wants the Codex to free himself. Serkis directed Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Marcel said the choice was deliberate: “We knew on Venom 2 that he was going to be this [Knull] character, we should be able to bring the character into this movie.”
Knull is a large idea with a small amount of screen time. The film treats him as a threat to be named rather than a villain to be fought, which is honest about what this movie is. It is the end of Eddie and Venom’s story, not the beginning of Knull’s.
The supporting cast fills in the rest. Cristo Fernández returns as the bartender from Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), playing both a version of the character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and one from Venom’s universe. Jared Abrahamson plays Captain Forrest, a member of Imperium. Jack Brady plays Jim, an Imperium security guard who bonds with a symbiote.
What the Trilogy Built
Here is how this paper would rank the three, strongest to weakest:
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) — the tightest of the three, and the one with the clearest idea of what it is.
- Venom: The Last Dance (2024) — bigger, sadder, and messier, but it commits to an ending.
- Venom (2018) — the origin story that never quite found its feet.
That order is arguable, and the gap between the top two is small. The Last Dance is also the only one of the three that tries to say something about the relationship at its center. The film received mixed reviews from critics, with some praising Hardy’s performance. That split makes sense. Hardy is doing two jobs at once here, and the human half is quieter than it has ever been.
The Lowest-Grossing Film in the Trilogy
The Last Dance was the lowest-grossing film in the trilogy. It was still a box-office success, grossing $478.9 million worldwide. That is the figure the studio gets to point at, and it is a solid one.
Sony began developing the film by December 2021, after the second one came out. Hardy had said in August 2018 that he was signed for a third. He and Marcel were writing by June 2022, and Marcel was set to make her directorial debut that October. Ejiofor and Temple joined in mid-2023, and filming started at the end of June 2023 in Spain. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike halted production the next month. It resumed that November, after the strike ended, and the film was finished by the end of February 2024.
Where the Movie Lands
The Last Dance is at its best when it stops explaining and lets Hardy and the symbiote bicker. It is at its worst when it stops to build a universe it will not get to use. The Imperium material does a job, but it is the least alive part of the film. Strickland and Paine are well cast and underused, and the Area 51 setting is a room full of symbiotes that the movie mostly keeps off-screen.
The Xenophage is a good monster. The Codex is a good clock. The Moons are a good detour. What holds it together is the decision to make this a farewell rather than a setup. Marcel and Hardy wrote a script that knows the difference between a franchise and a character, and they chose the character.
That choice costs the film some momentum. The middle drags. The government thread and the road thread do not always pull in the same direction. But the ending lands with real weight, and it lands because the film spent its 109 minutes admitting that Eddie and Venom are the only thing here worth protecting.
This is the part worth watching: a studio sequel that treats its own title as a promise and keeps it. The Last Dance is not the best superhero film of 2024. It is the most sincere one, and in a trilogy that started as a joke about a man sharing his body with a hungry alien, sincerity is the surprise.
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