The third movie in Sony and Tom Hardy’s Venom trilogy has arrived in theaters, but it isn’t really clear what’s next for the series. Like most superhero movies these days, Venom: The Last Dance doesn’t expressly answer that question during its initial runtime — it’s set up as closure for the trilogy that started with 2018’s Venom. But no one ever dies permanently in comics, and it’s rare for a film franchise to definitively cut off the possibility of a sequel. Stay through the credits, and you might find a few clues about the future.
To make sure you don’t miss any important details, here’s everything you need to know about Venom: The Last Dance’s post-credits scenes, including how many there are and how long you’ll have to wait to see them.
Does Venom: The Last Dance have a post-credit scene?
It has both a mid-credits scene and a stinger at the tail end of the credits, which are pretty long. But if you want a tiny hint about what’s up with the future of the Venom universe, you’ll need to stick around to the bitter end.
[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for Venom: The Last Dance.]
What happens in the Venom: The Last Dance post-credits scenes?
The first of the credit scenes gives us our best look yet at Knull (Andy Serkis), the universe-threatening villain who was barely actually in this movie. He spent the entire movie sitting in a chair and hanging his head, but for this scene, he finally looks up at the camera, revealing his face. (He looks mad.) He also says something about how the King in Black is awake now, and there’s no one to protect the universe anymore, seemingly implying that Venom’s death will somehow free him from his eternal prison.
That’s a weird way to play the ending, since Venom sacrificed himself specifically to prevent Knull from getting free, and supposedly now there’s no Codex left for him to use as a key. It’s basically just a bit of grandstanding. It’s also annoying that Knull talks about the King in Black like he’s a new character or a new threat — unless something’s been rewritten, Knull is the King in Black, and he’s just talking about himself in the third person and being grandiose.
The later post-credits scene, which seems more important to the future of the Venom franchise, shows the bartender from the beginning of the movie escaping from the wreckage of Area 51, and a cockroach scuttling toward a broken vial. That vial once contained a small specimen of Venom, which General Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) collected from that bar at the beginning of the movie.
While the scene cuts off before anything else happens, the clear implication is that our favorite symbiote has left a piece of himself behind and is about to get the first in a series of new animal hosts he can use to get back to his bestie Eddie, and that he isn’t as dead as the movie’s ending suggested. Whether this means Venom and Eddie will eventually get the cinematic reunion they deserve remains to be seen, and probably depends on whether Tom Hardy is up for more Venom adventures.
If he isn’t, the movie does also set up the possibility of a spin-off starring a different symbiote. Dr. Paine (Juno Temple) and her new pink alien friend appear to have formed the symbiote pair Agony. And while The Last Dance doesn’t do much to make an Agony movie seem like an interesting project, it’s in keeping with Sony’s Madame Web, another Spider-Man peripheral-character vehicle that set up sequels no one seems to want.
