Venom: The Last Dance aka Venom 3 is now in theaters. And while the movie is an hour and fifty minutes, a good chunk of that may be the credits. That’s partially because of the bonkers amount of effects people who worked on the film. But it’s also because there are two end credits scenes — or more specifically, a mid-credits scene, and a post-credits scene. If you’re wondering whether you need to stay through the whole credits? The answer is you can, but they’re both nonsense.
If you’re wondering what’s in store for you and don’t mind spoilers, read on… Because both scenes do depend heavily on understanding the plot of the movie. As much as a person can understand the plot of Venom 3.
So, let’s get into this.
Venom 3 Mid-Credits Scene Explained: Knull Swears Revenge
The plot of the movie, which I’ll explain as simply as possible here, is there is an all-powerful, Thanos-level bad guy named Knull (Andy Serkis). He was locked away millennia ago by the symbiotes on their home planet, Klyntar. And now he has a way out of his prison, thanks to something called the Codex, which resides only in Venom. He sends aliens called Xenophages (aka symbiote hunters) after Venom to bring the Codex back to him, so he can escape and bring eternal blackness to the entire universe.
By the end of the movie — seriously, spoilers — Venom (the symbiote) is dead. Venom melted itself and all of the Xenophages with some acid at Area 51. I’m obviously skipping a lot here, but the point is that Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is alive… But without the Venom symbiote. There are other symbiotes on Earth, including Agony (Juno Temple), and more on that in a second. But Venom is no more. Probably.
After Eddie goes and looks at the Statue of Liberty in honor of Venom, who mentioned wanting to do that several times in the movie, we get the main, animated credits showing various venomized animals, including a squirrel and a kangaroo. But immediately after that, we get the first post-credits scene.
We cut to Klyntar where Knull now knows that Venom is dead. “Your champion has fallen,” Knull says in the distinct growl of Andry Serkis being ominous. “Your planet will be mine. The King in Black is awake. I will kill your world. Everyone will burn. And you will watch.” The last shot of the scene is the full face reveal of Knull, looking like a cut scene from an ad for Final Fantasy XIV.
Given the Codex was the only thing that could free Knull, and Venom is the only being who had the Codex, and Venom is now dead… What in the world is Knull talking about? “Your champion has fallen”? His whole goal was to make sure the champion didn’t fall. This is bad news for Knull! This! Is! Nonsense!
Short version? Buddy, let’s wait until we see the box office returns for this one before we guarantee we’ll be watching Agony & Lasher: King in Black, in theaters never.
Venom 3 End Credits Scene Explained: Dani Rojas Rises
After the Knull scene, there are a lot of credits. You also get some of the biggest hits of the past six months, so you can jam out to those, then some of the score, and it ends with a song recapping the trilogy that can’t even come close to touching Eminem’s epically stupid “Venom” from the first movie.
Anyway, after Avi Arad’s vanity card and the Pascal Pictures card and all the rest of them, we finally get a post-credits scene, and it barely makes more sense than the mid-credits scene. Strap in, because this is complicated. In one of the post-credits scenes for Spider-Man: No Way Home, Eddie was hanging out in a bar in the MCU with a bartender played by Cristo Fernández — probably best known for playing Dani Rojas on Ted Lasso. In that movie, Venom left behind a little bit of the symbiote before getting sucked back into the Sony/Marvel Universe.
At the beginning of Venom: The Last Dance, we see that scene again, and then what happens next… Eddie is at the same bar in the Sony Universe, with Cristo Fernández, whose hair is longer now because they filmed this several years later. Venom forces Eddie to make a drink, which scares off Fernández’s bartender. Then, later, Fernández is back at the bar, where a little bit of the symbiote has been left behind — just like in No Way Home. As Cristo reaches out to touch it (did he not see Prometheus? Do not poke the goop!), in comes a soldier named Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who puts the Venom bit in a protective tube. He also, for good measure, shocks Cristo and brings him to his secure location under Area 51, Area 55. That’s the last we see of Cristo until the final end credits scene in the movie.
One more thing to mention to understand this end credits scene. Juno Temple’s Dr. Teddy Payne was hit by lightning as a kid on the beach, which left her scarred and her brother dead. And then in the final battle in the movie, she bonds with a symbiote called Agony, who has super-speed lightning powers. She’s embraced her weakness of whatever.
After the whole facility has been blown up by Strickland, when Venom dousing himself and the Xenophages with acid only half did the trick, Area 51 is now a smoking wasteland. Cristo stumbles out, wanders through the wreckage, and then starts yelling in a weird, funny way while he runs away. You’d think he would bond with the bit of the Venom symbiote left over from the bar, but nope! He just leaves.
The final shot of the movie is a cockroach wandering out, which calls back to Dr. Payne noting that cockroaches will survive anything. Next to the cockroach? The broken vial Payne got Agony from, and there’s a quick flash of colored lightning. The implication?
…Uh, I don’t know? Maybe they’re teasing Agony will be back, because Payne is still bonded to the symbiote when we last left her. Or the cockroach will also become Agony? Really, I don’t know what they were going for here, other than taking the most confusing parts of the movie and wrapping them all up in a — well, not a bow, but you know that jumble when you put some cords in a bag, and when you pull them out it takes you two hours to untangle them? Yeah, that.
Venom: The Last Dance is now in theaters.
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