Venom 3 Trailer Teases We’ll Finally Learn the Villain’s Origin Story

“Eddie… my home has found me,” the symbiote Venom warns his host Eddie Brock in the first trailer for the third Venom movie, Venom: The Last Dance. For the longest time, that statement wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.

After all, Venom’s “home” was Battleworld, the planet where the Beyonder took a cadre of heroes and villains in the 1984 Marvel Comics crossover Secret Wars. When Spider-Man’s costume was ruined, a machine on Battleworld created a new one for him, which later revealed itself to be a malevolent symbiote. When Peter abandoned the suit, it bonded with the equally aggrieved photographer Eddie Brock and became Venom.

Simple, right? So simple that the origin stayed pretty much the same over the years, even as guys like Carnage showed up. Alternate versions of the Venom story, such as Spider-Man 3 or the Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 video game, found ways around the lack of Secret Wars (or, in the case of the Venom movies, the lack of Spider-Man).

But with Venom: The Last Dance, the franchise may be able to get more comic accurate. The movie’s first trailer shows Eddie and Venom (the former played by Tom Hardy in the flesh and the latter by Tom Hardy’s voice) on the run from a government team led by Chiwetel Ejiofor. The major concern? An onslaught of symbiotes from Venom’s home planet.

During the recent King in Black crossover from 2018, Marvel introduced the elder god Knull, who created the symbiotes and spread them on the planet Klyntar. As seen in that crossover, Venom is right to be afraid of his homeworld. Knull nearly conquered the entirety of the cosmos, showing a level of power far beyond Venom, Carnage, or any other of the monsters we’ve seen thus far.

Written and directed by Kelly Marcel, who wrote the screenplay for Venom and 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, The Last Dance sounds like the end of the road for Hardy’s delightful take on the classic Spider-Man villain. Although Venom has done well at the box office, every other Sony Unspectacular Spider-Movie has flopped, most recently Madame Web. It might be the right time for a world-killing conqueror like Knull to arrive and wipe things clean.

Of course, there is another multiverse issue raised by the trailer. At the start of the trailer, we see Eddie and Venom stumbling away from the Mexican bar they visited in one of the post-credit scenes from Spider-Man: No Way Home. They devour a couple of thugs and then run from soldiers, who we also see capturing the big of Venom goo that the duo left in the bar run by Cristo Fernandez of Ted Lasso fame.

Here’s the thing — the post-credit sequence of No Way Home suggested that the bar was in the MCU, as Fernandez’s bartender talked about Iron Man, Hulk, and Thanos. At the end of the scene, Venom and Eddie seemed to blip away, presumably because of Doctor Strange‘s spell.

But in the trailer, we see Ejiofor’s soldier capture the Venom goo at the bar… so, is Venom still in the MCU? Probably not. This will likely be explained away as some sort of misunderstanding, such as the bartender talking about MCU movies that he watches in the Sony Spiderverse or something.

However, if Venom: The Last Dance really wants to give Eddie and Venom a spectacular send-off, then Knull and an attack from the planet Klyntar is exactly the type of cosmic level threat to necessitate some more multiversal shenanigans.

Venom: The Last Dance comes to theaters on Oct. 25, 2024.