Ever since the first Venom hit theaters six years ago, Marvel fans have been looking out for the anti-hero’s correlations with other sub-franchises or super-characters, especially Spider-Man, as Venom is a preeminent rival of the web-slinger. As the first movie in Sony’s revamped Marvel Universe, the original Venom proved to stand all on its own, with an obvious detachment from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
By the time Venom: Let There Be Carnage was coming close to completion, the Marvel multiverse was in full swing. The sequel ended with Venom transporting to the same universe as the MCU’s Peter Parker and Eddie watching Spider-Man’s identity exposed by J. Jonah Jameson on TV. That was the same cliffhanging breaking news that Spider-Man: Far From Home ended with a few years prior. Let There Be Carnage cleverly played into the convenient proximity its release date had to Spider-Man: No Way Home.
No Way Home featured many Spider-Man characters from across various alternate universes getting pulled into Peter’s reality, and Eddie Brock was apparently included because of Venom’s hive mind having some knowledge of Spider-Man. But when Doctor Strange reverses the spell in No Way Home’s climax, Eddie Brock is sent back to his own universe.
Now, in Venom: The Last Dance, Eddie’s first minutes reveal a little more of that sequence. He is shown in the MCU’s Earth-616, speaking with the bartender in Mexico. The barkeep is explaining what happened with Thanos and how the Infinity Stone collector snapped people out of existence for five years. During the conversation, Eddie is whisked away, back to his home universe, and comes face to face with a different version of the same bartender.
For fans who were hoping for more cross-franchise interrelatedness in The Last Dance, to either the MCU or the larger Sony Marvel Universe, unfortunately that scene is essentially the entirety of external tie-ins. There are no surprise cameos, such as Michael Keaton’s Vulture reality-hopping into Morbius, and no mentions of any of the plot points that occurred in the previous Sony Marvel entry, Madame Web. Although the latter does take place closer to the turn of the century, when Peter Parker is first born. Venom 3 also doesn’t offer any hints about the upcoming Kraven the Hunter feature.
The Last Dance’s concluding moments certainly bring a sense of finality to the anti-hero’s story. If this is truly the end of the road for Eddie’s Venom, what about those post-credit scenes? Could an unrestricted assault from Knull still play out on screen? And will the symbiotic specimen that General Strickland kept lead to more Venom action? With no current news of the series continuing, one could wonder why the filmmakers bothered to tease such storylines.
A fourth MCU Spidey flick is in the works, but those movies take place in an alternate reality, so it would be a bit of a multiversal stretch to work these prospective plotlines into Spider-Man 4. Venom actually left a piece of himself in Peter’s 616 universe at the end of No Way Home. So, although it is possible that symbiotes will have some role in Spidey’s upcoming adventures, it is still anyone’s guess as to what capacity, or in which form, a symbiote narrative will take.