Venom: The Last Dance trailer wants you to believe Eddie’s gonna die

Superhero movies inherently have life-or-death stakes—the villain must be defeated or else the world will end!—but Venom: The Last Dance really wants you to believe that Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his symbiote are gonna kick the bucket by the end of this movie. It’s pretty rare for one of these films to actually kill off its protagonist, but the Venom series has always been a twisted outlier from the typical superhero fare, and this is being billed as the conclusion of the trilogy. So maybe Hardy, who has a story credit on the film, really will commit to the trailer’s promise that “til death do they part” when the movie premieres on October 25.

The logline for Venom: The Last Dance (via Variety) reads: “Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance.” The stakes are certainly high. Eddie is being tracked by the government (led by Chiwetel Ejiofor as a military man and Juno Temple as a scientist) because of an extraterrestrial threat from Venom’s homeworld. Venom fans will remember that in the first film, the symbiotes were looking for planets with hosts they could possess and consume, but Venom abandoned that mission in favor of helping Eddie become a criminal-killing anti-hero. Perhaps that betrayal is what brought those big, freaky looking aliens to Earth: a menacing voiceover promises that “As long as Venom lives, everyone, everything will end.”

When we last saw Eddie and Venom, they’d been transported into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (a.k.a. Earth-616, for all you nerds out there) as a result of Doctor Strange’s multiverse-breaking spellwork. In a post-credits scene for Spider-Man: No Way Home, a bartender played by Ted Lasso’s Cristo Fernández had explained the ins and outs of the Avengers and their universe before Eddie and Venom were sent back to their own universe. A small piece of symbiote was left behind at Fernández’s bar. In the trailer, Ejiofor can be seen capturing that bit of symbiote in front of a disheveled Fernández. That presumably means that military personnel from Eddie’s universe have the ability to travel the multiverse—which is made all the more confusing because Ejiofor plays another character in the MCU, Karl Mordo, an ally and antagonist of Doctor Strange.

It’s a complicated web being weaved here, but all will (probably? hopefully?) be explained when the film premieres in October. Maybe it’s something to do with the symbiotes that allows people to traverse universes. Or maybe it’s just a big, dumb, fun superhero movie and we shouldn’t get too hung up on the weight of all that post-credits lore. Whichever road you choose to take, may you enjoy all the violence and chaos that Venom: The Last Dance has to offer.