Anti-Venom
Anti-heroes work when they’re rare exceptions to the heroic norm. You might think you want every superhero to be Wolverine, every space adventurer to be Han Solo, and perhaps every political figure to be a Trump, Bannon, or Musk, but that gets exhausting. Like comedy relief, these figures need a backdrop of normality from which to relieve us. It can’t be Halloween all year.
A character like Venom, the Marvel monster who this month appears in his third solo film, probably ought to appear only when fighting against, partnered with, or in a brief cameo abutted to some real hero—particularly Spider-Man, all of whose supporting characters’ film rights are controlled by Sony. Thus the string of dubious, obscure, slightly dark Sony film projects with a major hero palpably missing from their centers, projects such as Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and very soon Kraven the Hunter. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of Marvel characters, including an array of real heroes, are controlled by Disney: the Avengers, now the Fantastic Four, etc.
Were it not for a few recent stumbles by Disney and a couple of animated Sony triumphs featuring the neophyte Spider-Man named Miles Morales, one could almost use the formula “Disney good, Sony bad” to predict the quality of Marvel movies, with the vast majority of Marvel characters, such as the Avengers, being Disney-controlled. This year, that predictive formula would rightly have told you to steer clear of Madame Web and Venom: The Last Dance but to take in Deadpool & Wolverine.
The one worthwhile thing you’d miss by skipping this third and likely final Venom film is the nearly context-free dance referred to in the title, which turns out to be Venom’s grocer neighbor Mrs. Chen, played by Peggy Lu, surprisingly curvaceous and clad in striking red, cutting a rug in Las Vegas with the eight-foot-tall-or-so, demonic-looking, disco-appreciating Venom. This functions in part as a reminder that Venom’s biggest claim to fame—before the MCU-proper existed and featured Tom Holland as Spider-Man—was being the villain in the third Toby Maguire Spider-Man movie and functioning mainly as the snazzy black suit that possessed Peter Parker, making him, among other fiendish things, dance more confidently.
That might turn out to be about the most satisfaction we get out of Sony/Disney multiversal connectivity, but this movie hints at Sony’s futile longing to create stronger connections—a web of Spider-Man plot ties, if you will. Last Dance ever so briefly and somewhat confusingly introduces us to the (implausibly human-looking) evil god manipulating all alien symbiotes such as Venom, a god named Knull, who has recently been rumored to be a future major player in Marvel movies but given the mediocre box office returns of Venom: The Last Dance probably won’t be.
The final song on the soundtrack is a rap called “Knull & Void,” which almost fulfills my wish that Sony and Disney would cooperate enough to link Knull to the so-called Void into which forgotten characters get deposited in the Loki TV series and Deadpool & Wolverine, perhaps even steal a base or two by having the “Void” that a schizophrenic member of next year’s Thunderbolts team fears turn out to be the same phenomenon.
There’s extra pain for me in Knull’s inadequacy, and it perfectly exemplifies the way so many of these franchise entertainments leave one thinking: it could’ve been so much more. For Knull, you see, with his chalk-white skin, lanky figure, long white hair, corrupt throne, ebony blade, and contacts throughout the multiverse, is plainly something of a rip-off of the fantasy character Elric of Melnibone, the albino swordsman created by anarchist sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock, who’s still cranking out trashy but ambitious novels in his 80s and famously said, with sentiments that’ll stir the heart of hacks everywhere including me, that he’d rather write bad books about big ideas than big books about bad ideas.
Elric and thinly-veiled versions of Elric have fought their way across multiple universes for some 60 years now, a model for multiple franchises’ multiverses, with a few grateful responsive nods here and there across pop culture, including a conversation on Game of Thrones about what to call the king’s sword that nearly saw it dubbed Stormbringer, like Elric’s. As it stands, technically Knull’s own sword is also the blade seen in the hands of the God-Butcher (played by Christian Bale) who was the tragic villain in Thor: Love & Thunder. If all this were executed perfectly with more overt Elric nods, we might’ve seen monarchical gods slain by a universe-hopping, I.P.-flouting anarchist trickster spinning webs of nerdy resonance.
Two steps forward, one step back, though: just as some of us spent the final years of the 20th century thinking with frustration that the Hollywood people can’t quite get these individual super-characters right, for now we may be doomed, so to speak, by our own hopes to see these corporate bureaucracies, against all odds, somehow get whole universes, multiple universes right—and the connections between them, aesthetic and logical, to boot. It could all resonate with symbiotic beauty across worlds and genres, but for now, Venom cracks a few jokes and bites some bad guys’ heads off. It hurts to long for more.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey