The Venom trilogy has a self-awareness which marks it out from its Sony stablemates, thanks to the pairing of Tom Hardy and screenwriter/director Kelly Marcel.
As far as cinematic universes go, the one once inexplicably known as ‘SPUMC’ (the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters) hasn’t exactly gone down easy.
Sadly re-named Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) in 2021, two of the studio’s five live-action flicks have independently become go-to examples for critical and commercial failure. Were it not for a certain mouthy bit of black goo, Sony would have spent $160m on two good memes and a chance to hold onto the Spider-Man rights.
That bit of goo, of course, is Venom – the only big-screen superhero to repeatedly call his alter-ego a pussy. Far-removed from the symbiote’s straightforwardly sinister first outing in 2007’s Spider-Man 3, Tom Hardy’s interpretation of the character across his wildly successful trilogy has cemented him as a bizarre combination of an edgy sack of muscles and, in Venom’s own words, “a complete loser”. It’s like a certain, unsavoury portion of the internet is flat sharing with its own Id.
But the chemistry between Venom and Eddie Brock provides the multi-million-dollar goo to hold an entire shared universe together. Cast your mind back to the first half of 2018’s Venom, for example, and you’ll find almost exactly the kind of characterless exposition vehicle which has unfortunately come to define the former-SPUMC in the years since. Until, in easily the film’s most iconic scene, Tom Hardy climbs in a lobster tank.
The tone of that scene – improvised by Hardy in rehearsals a week before the shoot – would push the series in an entirely different direction. When it came to writing the film’s follow up, Let There Be Carnage, the producers seemed willing to lean into the actor’s chaotic interpretation of the character. Venom co-writer and long-term Hardy collaborator Kelly Marcel was put in charge of the script, and the pair set about on a story inspired by an unlikely source: The Seven Year Itch.
“We just kept asking ourselves: what would it feel like to have a roommate who basically rents a room inside your body that you can’t get rid of?”, Marcel told Discussing Film in 2021. The second film soon became a fully-fledged break-up movie. Against all the odds, it also became an awful lot of fun. The absurd fusion of genre and subject matter gave the film enough lift to escape the corporate pull of its SSU stablemates.
Read more: Venom: The Last Dance review | An unusual trilogy closer
It was an oddball sense of humour powered by two equally important collaborations: Eddie Brock and Venom, and Hardy and Marcel. The screenwriter recalled pandemic-fuelled hours with the actor breaking the story over FaceTime, re-capturing the anarchic spirit seen in glimpses in the first Venom movie.
“Working with the actor is brilliant in many ways because I can go off to write scenes and dialogue, but I have the actor there at my fingertips to run those lines back to me, if I need him to,” she said. “I can immediately see what works, what doesn’t work, what lands, what’s funny, what’s not funny, and that’s a luxury that I don’t think many writers get and it is so brilliant and so crucial.”
The result is a film which managed to parody the likes of Morbius and Madame Web before either had been shot. Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Cassidy (sadly without the Annie-style wig which defined his brief appearance in Venom) speaks exclusively in cliches and nonsensical rhyming couplets. The mechanics of the plot fall apart under the most perfunctory amount of scrutiny. But Hardy’s double act in the middle of it all (plus an underrated comic turn from Michelle Williams as Eddie’s ex-fiancé/couple’s councillor) throws enough anarchic swings at the audience that the 97-minute runtime flies by. Unlike its SSU companions, there’s a very distinct energy to the Venom-verse that marks it out as something unique in the superhero genre.
Podcast: Morbius (2022) and The Gift (2015)
Now, with trilogy-capper The Last Dance waltzing into cinemas, Hardy and Marcel’s double-act has reached its logical conclusion: her as sole screenwriter and director, him continuing to talk to himself as a pile of sentient goo. It’s the end of a series which might never have set critical circles alight, but very much feels like its own thing – and that’s more than we can say about Morbius.
Venom: The Last Dance is in cinemas now.