Venom on screen: Sony's saga with Tom Hardy (full analysis)

There are gambles nobody sees coming. Back in 2018, handing a whole film to the black symbiote of Spider-Man, with no Spider-Man on screen, looked like heresy to a lot of fans. Six years on, the Venom saga carried by Tom Hardy has taken more than $1.8 billion at the worldwide box office and closed on a complete, coherent and surprisingly moving trilogy . Three films, one utterly committed actor, an unlikely couple made of a washed-up journalist and a brain-hungry alien creature: here is the full analysis of the Venom saga on screen, from its origins to its final bow.

This article deliberately focuses on the Sony films with Tom Hardy. If you are after the character’s roots in the comics, his link with Peter Parker and his birth in 1988, you will find it all in our dedicated feature on the complete history of the black symbiote. Here, we are talking cinema, box office, casting and direction.

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe: where does this saga come from?

To understand why Venom got his own films without ever crossing paths with Spider-Man, you have to go back to a question of rights. Since 1998, Sony Pictures has held the film rights to Spider-Man and to his huge gallery of supporting characters: the villains, the allies and, above all, the symbiotes. This complex rights split, which we set out in our article on who really controls Spider-Man between Marvel, Disney and Sony, explains everything. Sony could exploit Venom, but could not have him appear alongside the Peter Parker of the MCU, control of whom is shared with Marvel Studios.

That constraint gave birth to Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU), a parallel franchise built around the antiheroes and villains of the spider universe. Venom was its cornerstone, the founding hit that gave Sony the nerve to launch Morbius in 2022, then Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter in 2024. None of these satellites came close to Venom’s popularity, which shows just how much the chemistry between Tom Hardy and his creature looked like a commercial miracle.

Venom (2018): the unlikely birth of a blockbuster

Released on 5 October 2018 and directed by Ruben Fleischer, the first Venom was savaged by the critics and adored by audiences. A rare split that sums the thing up perfectly: a wobbly film, often clumsy in its writing, but carried by infectious energy and a completely uninhibited lead performance. On a budget of around $100 million, it took more than $850 million worldwide, a tidal wave that immediately justified a sequel.

Eddie Brock, the Life Foundation and Riot

The plot follows Eddie Brock, an investigative journalist in San Francisco whose career and relationship with Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) collapse after a botched investigation into the Life Foundation. This company, run by billionaire Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), is running secret experiments on alien symbiotes brought back from a comet. Breaking into the lab to prove what is going on, Eddie accidentally merges with one of them: Venom.

The film’s antagonist is Riot, a brutal silver symbiote who bonds with Carlton Drake to bring his whole species to Earth. The character draws directly on the lore of the Life Foundation symbiotes, a family of creatures we explore in detail in our portrait of Riot in the comics. The climax, a chaotic showdown on a rocket at lift-off, ends with the deaths of Riot and Drake, while Venom chooses Earth — and Eddie — as his new home.

A relationship comedy disguised as an action film

What gives this first instalment its lasting charm is what it really is: a strange romantic comedy between a man and the monster living in his head. Tom Hardy literally plays both parts, lending his cavernous voice to Venom, and turns their inner dialogue into a gleefully split-personality acting turn. The restaurant scene where Eddie climbs into the lobster tank, or the one where Venom tells him off like a toxic flatmate, created a double-act dynamic the sequels only amplified. That fused, turbulent relationship sits at the heart of the symbiote myth, a theme we unpick in our analysis of the dark, legendary relationship between Spider-Man and the symbiote.

The post-credits scene changes everything: Eddie visits a wild-eyed serial killer in prison, Cletus Kasady, played by Woody Harrelson under an improbable ginger wig. His chilling promise — when he gets out, and he will get out, there will be carnage — already trailed the sequel and the most eagerly awaited villain of the saga.

This popular success was also built outside cinemas. The title track Venom written by Eminem was a streaming hit, while fans turned the duo’s lines into viral memes. That cultural phenomenon proved something essential to Sony: the character did not need Spider-Man to exist on his own. Where critics saw a dated, incoherent film, a whole generation of viewers saw a funny, unpredictable and deeply likeable antihero, exactly the kind of figure you want to see again film after film.

BECOME THE SYMBIOTE

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021): red against black

Released in the United States on 1 October 2021, this second instalment marks a turning point. Sony handed directing duties to Andy Serkis, the legendary motion-capture actor (Gollum, Caesar in Planet of the Apes), who understands better than anyone the mechanics of a digital character talking to a human. The result is shorter, brisker and far more committed to its horror-comedy tone. Despite opening in the middle of the post-pandemic recovery, the film passed $500 million in worldwide takings.

Cletus Kasady and Carnage, the scarlet terror

The big addition in this film is Carnage. When Cletus Kasady bites Eddie during a prison interview, he swallows a trace of the symbiote and gives birth to a blood-red creature, more powerful and infinitely more unstable than Venom. Woody Harrelson plays a killer driven by a loving, destructive madness, whose fractured psychology sits at the centre of the character. To grasp just how dark this figure is, our article on the dark story of Cletus Kasady traces his origins in the comics.

The film also introduces Shriek (Naomie Harris), Cletus’s mutant partner armed with a devastating sonic scream, a faithful accomplice to the chaos she spreads in the comics. The toxic relationship between Cletus and Shriek echoes, in a distorted mirror, the one between Eddie and Venom. The final showdown in a cathedral, black against red, plays cleverly on the symbiotes’ shared weaknesses: sound and fire. Venom wins by a whisker, devouring Carnage and closing the Kasady chapter.

The post-credits scene that broke the internet

It is impossible to talk about this film without mentioning its post-credits scene, one of the most discussed in recent superhero cinema. As Eddie and Venom lounge in a hotel room, reality wobbles: they are briefly transported into the universe of the MCU, where the television is showing Tom Holland’s face as Spider-Man. That reveal sets up Venom’s appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home and its opening of the multiverse, where the duo turn up fleetingly in a Mexican bar before leaving again, leaving behind a tiny fragment of symbiote.

Venom: The Last Dance (2024): the last tango

Released on 25 October 2024, this third and final film closes the trilogy and is the fifth instalment of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. It marks the directing debut of Kelly Marcel, screenwriter on all three films, who co-wrote the story with Tom Hardy himself. This last chapter fully embraces the duo’s emotional side: it is no longer just an action comedy, it is the story of a goodbye.

Knull, the Xenophages and the final hunt

The stakes finally go cosmic. From his prison at the heart of the planet Klyntar, the god of the symbiotes, Knull , is trying to escape. To do it, he unleashes his hunters, the Xenophages, on Venom, because Venom is carrying a codex, a key capable of freeing the god. On screen, this threat extends a mythology the comics built over years: to understand the scale of the character, our feature on Knull, the god of the symbiotes sheds light on everything the film only brushes past.

Hunted by the government and by the Xenophages, Eddie and Venom go on the run across the United States, crossing paths with a family on a road trip and a scientist fascinated by symbiotes, Dr Teddy Payne (Juno Temple), inside a secret base that recalls the famous Area 51. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays General Rex Strickland, a soldier determined to hunt the creature down. The film piles on the spectacular set pieces, including a flight on the back of a symbiote horse that fans instantly turned into a cult moment.

A sacrifice that closes the loop

The finale plays out at the military base, overrun by a swarm of Xenophages. To stop the codex falling into Knull’s claws and to save Eddie, Venom sacrifices himself, dissolving in a bath of acid that wipes out the creatures. The last dance of the title then makes complete sense: it is the heartbreaking goodbye of one being to the one who was, for six years, his other half and his best friend. The post-credits scene still leaves a door ajar: Knull remains imprisoned, but a fragment of symbiote has survived, casting doubt on a possible return.

TOTAL IMMERSION

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The Venom trilogy at a glance

To place the three films clearly, with their dates, their directors and their antagonists, here is a summary table of the complete saga.

Tom Hardy, the soul of the saga

It would be dishonest to analyse this trilogy without doing justice to the man who carries it from start to finish: Tom Hardy. A demanding actor, known for his intensity in Bronson, Warrior or Mad Max: Fury Road, he could have treated Venom as a simple payday. He did exactly the opposite. Hardy got involved in the writing, notably on The Last Dance, and defended a precise vision: a buddy movie in disguise, where the real subject is never the action but the relationship between the two beings.

It is said, too, that Tom Hardy improvised a good part of the interactions between Eddie and Venom on set, constantly looking for the right balance between the slapstick and the pathetic. It is that freedom of performance, rare in a tightly controlled blockbuster, that gives the saga its very particular streak of madness. At no point do you feel the actor holding back or sneering at the material: he believes in it, and his conviction rubs off on the viewer.

His performance rests on uncommon physical and vocal gymnastics. He plays Eddie, a tired, clumsy, endearing man, while giving Venom a deep voice and a comic cheek that make you forget it is the same actor. That duality is the key to the saga’s popular success: audiences did not come for a terrifying supervillain, but for a dysfunctional couple they ended up loving. The approach is a radical break from the Venom of the comics, a gap you can measure by comparing the films with the many alternative versions of Venom in the multiverse.

What the films change compared with the comics

The film saga takes enormous liberties with the source material, and that is exactly what has fed the debate between purists and the general public. The most striking difference is of course the total absence of Spider-Man. In the comics, the symbiote bonds first with Peter Parker before being rejected, then feeds its hatred of the hero by merging with Eddie Brock. Without Spider-Man, the films had to reinvent the character’s origin and his deepest motivation from scratch.

Another major departure: the tone. The Venom of the page is a figure of pure horror, a head-devouring predator. The films keep that cannibal streak but wrap it in humour, turning the brutal antihero into a comic companion. Finally, the handling of Carnage disappointed some fans: in the comics, Cletus Kasady is one of the most demonic killers in the whole universe, the engine of devastating events such as Maximum Carnage or Absolute Carnage. His more hurried treatment on screen does not entirely do justice to that status. For collectors and fans who want to extend the universe beyond the screen, choosing merchandise deserves a proper guide, and that is exactly the point of our complete guide to choosing your Venom and symbiote products.

A TRUE FAN’S WAKE-UP

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Venom and the rest of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe

The Venom trilogy never really merged with the other SSU films, despite a few attempts at a connection. Morbius (2022), with Jared Leto as the living vampire, ended on a confused post-credits scene involving Michael Keaton’s Vulture, without ever managing to weave a clear narrative thread with Eddie Brock. Our analysis of why Morbius is a villain apart looks back at this character so poorly used on screen.

The last two satellites, Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter, both released in 2024, had a difficult time with critics and at the box office, to the point of calling into question the very future of the SSU in this form. Against that backdrop, Venom stands out as the golden exception: the only franchise of the lot to bring a wide audience together across three whole films. The paradox is striking, because it was also the concept that looked, on paper, the most likely of all to fall flat.

Is the Venom saga worth watching today?

If you come to these films looking for a masterpiece of screenwriting or a literal adaptation of the comics, you are heading for disappointment. But if you take them for what they are, three uninhibited blockbusters carried by a unique chemistry between an actor and his digital creature, they offer generous, funny entertainment that is, in its final act, surprisingly touching. The trilogy has the rare merit of a real ending, a complete arc running from the meeting to the goodbye, which is rare in modern franchise cinema.

To keep exploring, you can follow on with other gems of the big-screen spider world: our pick of the best Spider-Man film of all time puts the Venom saga back in the web-slinger’s vast cinematic landscape, and lets you measure how far things have come since 2002. And if you want to put on a themed night around the symbiote, our guide to where to watch the Spider-Man films on streaming will help you track down the whole trilogy easily.

In the end, the Venom saga will be remembered as an unlikely gamble that turned into a cultural success. Tom Hardy gave a comic-book monster a soul, a sense of humour and a fragility nobody expected. The black symbiote, once Peter Parker’s pure nightmare, became on screen a figure the wider public loves. It was not faithfulness that made these films strong, but nerve. And sometimes, in cinema, nerve is enough to give birth to a legend we carry on celebrating long after the closing credits.