For writer director Kelly Marcel, Venom: The Last Dance is a lot of things: the climax of a thrilling trilogy, a high-stakes showdown against an unstoppable alien threat … “It’s more than just one movie. It’s the final chapter of an odyssey. It’s a real honor to bring this story to an end. It’s a really emotional conclusion to the Venom trilogy. It’s a classic rom-com.”
In Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. 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.
Read more about: Venom / Venom: Let There Be Carnage
Marcel, who co-wrote the last two Venom films as well as served as Executive Producer on Venom and Producer on Venom: Let There Be Carnage, makes her directorial debut with Venom: The Last Dance. As she stepped into the role of director, Marcel was excited to continue her longtime collaboration with Tom Hardy, who plays both Eddie and Venom. Marcel and Hardy developed a story for Venom: The Last Dance, which Marcel used to write the screenplay.
“Tom and I have a really good language with each other,” Marcel says. “He understands my writing, and I know how to build characters for him that he enjoys playing. For The Last Dance, we spent a week in a hotel in London just bashing out the story from morning ‘til morning. Tom and I agreed that this movie needs to be the biggest, most amped up Venom of them all, and we’re lucky the studio trusts us to make it in the way that we see it and feel it.”
“It feels very emotional for me and Tom to bring it to the audience, because it’s our baby,” says Marcel, who directed and crafted the screenplay from a story by Tom Hardy & Kelly Marcel, based on the Marvel Comics. “I just hope we’ve done the fans proud and given a fitting ending to these characters that we love so much.”
“The Venom trilogy is a classic rom-com, really,” Marcel says, laughing. “Eddie Brock and Venom meet in the first film. In Venom: Let There Be Carnage, they’ve got the seven year itch and they break up. Now, as we conclude their story, they have finally learned to live with each other, they’ve finally reached symbiosis, but will they be able to stay together?”
Venom: The Last Dance picks up where the previous film left off, with Eddie and Venom on the run after defeating Cletus Kasady and his symbiote, Carnage. That showdown revealed Venom’s existence – not just to authorities on Earth but to a ruthless adversary deep in the cosmos. “Eddie and Venom have been exposed to the outside world because of the massive fight at Grace Cathedral,” Marcel says. “Their escape means that The Last Dance is a road trip movie. They’re being chased not only by people from our world, but also by powerful forces from Venom’s home world, Klyntar. The longer Eddie and Venom stay together, the more of a threat they pose to the entire planet.”
“Working with Tom is just really fun,” Marcel continues. “He’s one of my best mates, and he’s incredibly smart. He understands these characters inside and out, and he’s a fountain of ideas. It’s amazing.”

Marcel and Hardy made sure to keep their storytelling grounded in what fans love about the Venom saga. “We’re very inspired by the comics, and we wanted to listen to the fans and see where they want this story to go next,” Marcel says. “But we knew that we were going to be concluding this trilogy, and we wanted to make it emotional. We wanted to take Venom and Eddie’s relationship to the next level.”
At the heart of that relationship is Eddie himself. “Eddie Brock is a pretty selfish guy when you first meet him in Venom,” says Marcel. “He destroys his relationship by lying to his fiancée and ending her career. He’s a journalist who enjoys his own face and fame, and Venom completely destroys all of that and strips him down to his basic self. In Venom: The Last Dance, Eddie is older and wiser, and he’s learned so much more patience and tolerance. He’s learned how to really love someone.”
But some things never change. Venom hasn’t lost the pure, unbridled id that made him so much fun in the first two films—although he has evolved. “Venom doesn’t have a filter,” says Marcel. “He just does what he wants. Eddie is the one that’s constantly trying to rein in this mad, joyful creature who isn’t burdened by societal norms. But what’s interesting in this movie is that Venom has had to grow up a bit. He’s learned some fear, and he does have some worry. He ultimately has to make a very tough decision.”
Venom’s character didn’t just come from the script or comics. During production on the first Venom film, Hardy played a pivotal role in bringing the symbiote to life—and that has continued throughout the series. “Tom played around with lots of different voices, and that’s where Venom started,” says Marcel. “He hit on the right voice, and once we heard it, it lent itself to Venom’s bombastic dialogue. That voice came from a little voice note recording that Tom sent, saying, ‘I think he sounds like this.’”
From that first voice memo, Hardy was able to develop Venom’s character both on the page and on the set. “Tom and I do a lot of improvisation,” says Marcel. “Tom wears an earpiece on the set that you can’t see, and he’ll record what is written for Venom on the page. Then we put Venom into his ear so that he can play to the voice in his head. I can also speak to him in his ear, so if I come up with a good line in the moment, I can put that line down in his ear, and he’ll bat it back and continue the scene.”
On most films with CG characters, the VFX team is on set to place specific markers so the actor knows where their eyeline should be, but the Venom filmmakers put this decision in Hardy’s hands. “We don’t mark the location of Venom’s head when it’s outside of Eddie’s body,” Marcel continues. “We let Tom be free with where he places Venom while they’re interacting, and we just stay on our toes to keep Venom in frame. I’ve never seen anybody do what he’s able to do in those moments.”
Together, Eddie and Venom give Hardy a chance to portray a relationship that’s part spectacular, part absurd, and genuinely moving. “Eddie and Venom love each other,” Marcel says. “They’re best friends. You’ve got to sacrifice a lot if you’re going to give up your body to an alien, if you’re going to share your inner and outer self with a great big toddler – albeit an especially dangerous one. Eddie and Venom bring out the best in each other.”
Kelly Marcel’s breakthrough came when her TV show Terra Nova was the subject of a bidding war, culminating in Steven Spielberg producing it as a £60m 13-episode series for Twentieth Century Fox. Marcel subsequently wrote the feature screenplay Saving Mr. Banks, charting the extraordinary and true story of the twenty year struggle to bring Mary Poppins to the screen.
She followed that by adapting E.L. James’ literary phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey into an international box-office smash for Universal, taking $571 million worldwide.
Marcel came on to work on Sony Pictures’ Venom adaptation as one of the writers, and subsequently executive produced the film. Venom earned more than $855 million globally.
She wrote and produced the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which was the seventh-highest grossing film of 2021.
In 2023, Marcel’s eight-part television adaption of Victor Lavelle’s novel The Changeling, which she showran and executive produced. aired on Apple TV+. The director Melina Matsoukas and Marcel received IndieWire’s 2023 Auteur Award in recognition of the series.
Creating The World Of Venom
As one of Marvel’s most morally complicated characters—and a character who is brought to life through visual effects—Venom needed a first-rate VFX team.
“One of our challenges is getting Venom to emote,” says VFX supervisor John Moffatt. “He’s got quite a different biology to his face. He’s got a massive smile, huge eyes, and no ears. So when you animate that, you have to use different gestures. One of the things that Kelly, Tom, and I have been working hard on is getting a CG character to portray an emotional performance, since so much of this movie is an emotionally charged story.”
To get that performance, Moffatt worked closely with Hardy. “We’re trying to lean into Tom’s performance as much as possible to allow him to play against Venom,” Moffatt says. “He’s really collaborative. We let his performance drive what we’re doing, rather than trying to say, ‘Hey, visual effects needs this or that.’ It’s all about keying into Tom’s performance.”

Moffatt also developed the other symbiotes in the film, and the variety of creatures that host Venom. “As for Venom’s hosts, I remember on first reading the script, I was like, ‘Wow, a Venom horse! A Venom fish!’ We’re having fun with the way that a symbiote can morph or combine with another creature. How do we portray Venom’s sense of humor or behavior into those other creatures? What effect does that have on Eddie? The scene with the horse is especially cool. It’s a really fun sequence.”
Venom: The Last Dance also relies on strong production design, especially in the military installation. “Chris Lowe, our production designer, had to create a whole plethora of sets,” says Marcel.
Director of Photography Fabian Wagner was up to the challenge of capturing all the elements of each sequence and scene. “We have lots of different locations and lots of different looks,” Wagner says. “Since this movie is a road trip, there’s constant movement with a lot of choreography, but we also have some very intimate scenes, which are beautiful. We’ve been using everything from the usual cranes doing some epic wide shots, but also a lot of handheld work. It’s a very interesting mixture.”
Wagner is especially happy that audiences can see the film in IMAX. “I love the cinema and I love the experience you get from sitting in the cinema,” Wagner continues. “It’s a completely different experience to sitting at home in front of your TV. I think this movie has a whole new scope to it that audiences will appreciate on the IMAX screen.”
