Sony's Venom trilogy is a romantic comedy. Here's what that means moving forward.

Reactions to Venom: The Last Dance have been filtering in over the last week since the film’s release and audience response is largely ambivalent. The movie follows the previous two in its wacky antics and surface-level storytelling to deliver exactly what was promised: a satisfying conclusion to the Sony trilogy of Venom and Eddie Brock. However, while not particularly poignant, to suggest the trilogy didn’t have an arc would be wrong. The arc followed one of the most basic structures in fiction: that of the romantic comedy.

The first Venom movie was a textbook situation of “Boy Meets Girl” except instead of a girl, it's an alien symbiote. Venom and Eddie’s introduction follows classic meet-cute tropes, from introducing Eddie just after a breakup when his life is falling apart to Venom’s playful antagonism that grows into genuine affection by the end of the film.

The trend continues in Venom: Let There Be Carnage with the dramatic act 2 breakup and the direct paralleling of Venom and Eddie with the overtly romantic pairing of Cletus and Frances. The second film was about them finding their legs as a couple and figuring out who they were to each other. Venom: The Last Dance followed through a natural progression: trying to figure out where and how to settle down and start a family.

The themes of the movie were not subtle – Eddie being a wanted man figures he can get himself and Venom protection by returning to his roots in New York City. Along the way, they’re forced to deal with how far Eddie is willing to go to protect himself and his life, and what the Venom symbiote sees for both of them moving forward. It becomes obvious very quickly that Venom wants a family, as he compliments Eddie by telling him he’d make a good dad and invokes the other symbiotes for support during the third act - which results in a positive family atmosphere among symbiotes for the first time in the saga.

For those familiar with the comics, this paternal ambition won’t come as a surprise. Eddie Brock does bear a child for himself and Venom in The Nativity arc, written by Mike Costa and Mark Bagley in 2018. By this point in the comics, the Venom symbiote had already been a parent several times over, but it wanted his child with Eddie to be different and not turn out evil. Movie Venom’s gentle reassurance and spousal encouragement toward parenthood definitely allude to that same motivation.

Now everyone who's already seen Venom: The Last Dance might already be seeing a problem in that Venom and Eddie are separated at the end of the film with the symbiote presumably dead. The film does, however, leave breadcrumbs to how it can come back in three key instances. In Dr. Teddy Paine’s introduction as a symbiote scientist, she makes a comment about how the only thing left at the end of the destruction of Area 51 will be cockroaches. Later on, the doctor breaks open a smaller sample of a symbiote and lets it overtake her, leading us to believe that as long as part of the whole symbiote exists somewhere, the symbiote lives on. And then of course, the post-credit scene pans over the abandoned wreckage of Area 51 and focuses on a cockroach crawling around a broken symbiote sample tube. All this to say: the Venom symbiote is alive in the desert skittering around in a cockroach.

What does this mean for Venom’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Well, it could mean a couple of things. Seeing as the Venom films and MCU’s Spider-Man canonically live in different universes, we could be looking at another multiverse event. Given the clues as to what to expect from Spider-Man 4, this seems one of the likelier ways to introduce Venom into the MCU. However, Venom has already been in Tom Holland's Spider-Man universe, so it’s equally likely that the bit of Venom that was left behind in the bar after he and Eddie were sucked back into their own world could become the star of the show. In either case, I believe the motivation for the symbiote will be the same: get back to Eddie. Whether this will make it a foe or an ally for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, that’s for the writers to figure out. All we know is that the Eddie Brock trilogy might be over, but Venom’s story isn’t. So hopefully we’ll get to see a reunion for the two in other Marvel films moving forward.