Venom: The Last Dance Poster from IMDB.com
I never liked the character of Venom very much, a fact that often surprises other fans. I really enjoy the movies, though. This weekend, when I saw Venom: The Last Dance, I actually felt a little melancholy. If this truly is the last time I’ll see this particular take on Venom and Eddie Brock, well, I think I might actually start to miss the guy.
Venom became crazy popular in comics in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like all things Marvel Comics, the symbiote has a complicated origin from Marvel’s first maxi-series, Secret Wars. Venom actually started out as a black suit that Spider-Man discovered when he turned on the wrong machine to fix his torn-up costume back in 1984. See? Perfectly relatable. Spider-Man is the hero who could be you.
Later, after discovering that the suit that improved his powers somewhat was also a parasitic organism bent on controlling his body, Spidey ditched the suit with the aid of the Fantastic Four. Later, when the suit tried to take Spidey back, our arachnid hero blasted it off himself using a pealing church bell. Unfortunately, the costume bonded with reporter Eddie Brock, turning him into Venom. Brock hated Spider-Man. The symbiote claimed to be the same, but it wanted to bond with Spidey again.
I have this theory that there are a lot of Marvel Comics characters that work best as guest stars rather than protagonists of their own books. Nick Fury (not the Samuel L. Jackson version) and the Inhumans are prime examples. Spider-Man has a bunch of these characters in his rogue’s galleries– opponents who shifted over into a more heroic status when Marvel went looking for commercial success. Sympathetic foes like Morbius the Living Vampire or the Prowler make for protagonists with tragic flaws. Many of these characters become anti-heroes in their own right, but then they kind of lose their charm.
The Punisher is a prime example. I think he is the most interesting counterpoint for guys like Spider-Man or Daredevil. The Punisher’s penchant for violence creates a strong contrast to the heroes who bend the rules a bit. The Punisher is a walking question to Spidey and DD—how far are you willing to go? How far is too far? But in the gritty era of 1990s comics, the Punisher became a gun-toting mobster-killing vengeance machine. I disliked that, but others bought plenty of his comics.
In that same commercial context, it was only natural that Venom would be shifted into an anti-heroic mode. Venom became a “lethal protector.” The minute that happened, Venom became boring to me. In the comic book Eddie Brock was a creep and a bore. The symbiote was not interesting if it no longer craved to be with Spider-Man. Venom just ran around with a kind of terrifying Spider-Man routine. That take on the character never really worked for me.
Interestingly, Venom’s movie version was completely without Spider-Man. Thanks to the vagaries of the relationship between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and whatever Sony Pictures calls its Spider-Man universe (maybe the Please Forget We Made Morbius And Madame Webverse), Spider-Man does not appear in Venom’s origin. Venom (2018) takes a more classic sci-fi approach, making the symbiote a weird life form accidentally brought to Earth. Later it will bond with Eddie Brock, a world-weary reporter who still has a good heart and a desire to help others through journalism. The focus is on Eddie and the symbiote without Spider-Man around to complicate things. They become this strange comedy duo that shares one body. There is a lot of laughter to be mined in the bizarre body horror/humor of the creature, the wildly insane fights, and the dark action. Ultimately, Venom becomes a lot more fun.
Right now, Venom’s future is a bit unclear. This third movie in the trilogy has underperformed the characters’ two prior cinematic outings. The domestic take is especially low. Another film seems unlikely. Still, I hold out hope that Venom could return. While the character’s dimensional shift into the MCU was quickly undone in The Last Dance, surely an interdimensional doorway swings both ways, and we can get Venom into the MCU someday.
