dance

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Venom: The Last Dance.

The third Venom movie may be subtitled The Last Dance, but as is the case with almost every superhero movie, it ends with post-credits scenes that tease another possible waltz to come. But the post-credits scenes dangle two storylines that in all likelihood will never be followed up on—as seems to be the case with most of the post-credit scenes in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe and plenty of other superhero flicks.

Venom: The Last Dance follows Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock as he and the alien symbiote he’s bonded with (Venom, also voiced by Hardy) flee a government agency and an unstoppable extra-terrestrial killer through the Nevada desert. Commander Rex Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is leading the special forces pursuing Venom, as the organization known as Imperium is trying to capture all of the various symbiotes that have landed on Earth. The alien creature also pursuing them is a xenophage, a nasty monster sent by a supervillain called Knull. Played by Andy Serkis (though for most of the movie you only see the top of his head), Knull pre-dates the universe and he created all the symbiotes, only for them to turn on him and imprison him. The connection between Venom and Eddie is the key to his freedom, and Knull sends the xenophage to hunt them down. 

By the end of the movie, Venom and Eddie have realized that they can’t stop the xenophages, even after Strickland realizes the symbiotes are the lesser of two evils and offers Imperium’s help against the monsters. As long as Venom and Eddie are connected, there’s a chance Knull could be freed, so Venom ultimately opts to sacrifice himself in an acid bath that takes out the xenophages and ensures that Knull will stay locked up forever. The movie ends with Eddie gazing out at the Statue of Liberty while clips of all the good times he and Venom had over the past three films play out.

But the post-credit scenes suggest that we may not have seen the last of Knull or Venom, even though in all likelihood, we probably have. 

What Happens in the Venom: The Last Dance Post-Credits Scenes

Venom: The Last Dance’s first post-credit sequence comes midway through the credits. We cut back to Knull, who is still imprisoned in his throne, still looking down so we only see the top of his head and his greasy, long white hair. He’s angry, and he notes that with Venom’s death, The King in Black is awake and there’s nobody left to protect the universe. He looks up, and we finally get a glimpse of Knull’s face, looking very much like a computer-generated fantasy bad guy, akin to something from a World of Warcraft cutscene.

This is pretty standard post-credits stuff—the defeated villain saying “I’ll be back”—but it doesn’t make sense within the context of the movie that preceded it. The whole point of Venom’s death was that, as long as he was alive and bonded with Eddie, there was a chance for Knull to escape his imprisonment. Knull, whose first appearance in Marvel’s comics was fairly recent, in 2018, is also known as “The King in Black,” so he’s not teasing some new, greater threat, just impotently saying that we haven’t seen the last of him.

Read More: Review: Tom Hardy Is One Good Reason to See Venom

The second and final post-credits scene comes at the very end, and it’s an amusing callback. Earlier in the movie, Eddie and Venom freaked out a bartender at a Mexican resort when they made themselves a drink behind the bar, using Venom’s tentacles to flip (and break) bottle after bottle of booze. After Eddie left, he left a tip on the bar—and unwittingly left a little bit of the symbiote with it. A few scenes later, Rex appeared at the bar, collected the symbiote sample, and took the bartender in for questioning. He is not mentioned or seen again until the post-credits scene, where the confused bartender stumbles out of the wreckage of Area 51 wondering what on earth happened. As this occurs, a cockroach crawls by the broken vial containing the symbiote sample, suggesting that, like a cockroach, Venom is harder to kill than you think.

This, again, is pretty typical for a post-credits scene—a funny joke, combined with a little tease that the hero lives on. It has the bonus of not begging follow-ups the way the Knull scene does. Venom might not be dead after all! Isn’t that nice? That’s a very different sentiment than Knull, this villain who didn’t actually do much of anything in this movie, says now he’s going to actually do something. Guess we’ll find out in the next movie?

The Venom movies are by far the most commercially, and, to a lesser extent, critically successful of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe films. Box-office tracking for The Last Dance, especially overseas, is fairly healthy, with more than $150 million in revenue expected, so it’s possible there could be a fourth movie—though who knows if Hardy would want to tango a fourth time. The ending of the film, post-credits excluded, certainly feels pretty definitive. If there is no sequel, Knull’s big boast will join the ranks of Madame Web’s tease of a Spidey-team that will surely never see another adventure (no amount of money could get Sydney Sweeney to return for a supporting role in Madame Web 2) and Morbius‘s confusing multiverse-spanning Michael Keaton cameo.

The trend of dead-end post-credits scenes extends past the Sony Spider-Man movies, too. Many recent entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe end with teases that, based on the reception to the films, don’t seem especially likely to get revisited. Remember when Harry Styles appeared in Eternals? Or when Hercules appeared in Thor: Love and Thunder? Or when Kelsey Grammer put on the blue makeup to play Beast again after The Marvels was all said and done?

As the future of superhero movies seems less sure than it’s been for two decades now, it’s only natural that post-credits scenes—which frequently exist to set up the future—would be in a bit of a rut, too. Venom: The Last Dance has post-credits scenes because that’s what superhero movies do. Whether those scenes will matter going forward seems especially doubtful.