Venom 3 Trailer: Spider-Man Mistake or Multiverse Madness?

It seems Doctor Strange’s memory-erasing spell has affected our dimension.

The first trailer for Sony’s Venom: The Last Dance was released Monday, and it appears to pick up from where we left symbiote host Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy): blipping between Sony’s Spider-Man Universe and Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe in the end credits sequences linking 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Spider-Man: No Way Home. (Also revealed: new Venom 3 plot details.)

To recap: Let There Be Carnage ended with Eddie magically transported across the multiverse and into the MCU, where he watched J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) expose an unmasked Spider-Man’s (Tom Holland) secret identity on live television. In No Way Home, a mid-credits scene showed Eddie drunk in a bar in Mexico (where he apparently spent his entire spell in this alternate universe). It was the sorcerer Stephen Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) magic that made everyone forget Spider-Man is Peter Parker, only for the spell to go haywire and, instead, pull in everyone who knows Peter is Spider-Man from every universe into one.

Ultimately, Strange sent villains like Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) and Electro (Jamie Foxx) back to their respective universes. Spider-Man and Strange prevented cataclysmic spillover from the multiverse with a sacrifice: a second spell erased all memories of Peter Parker as if he never existed in the MCU (and it certainly seems that the wall-crawler doesn’t exist in Sony’s Spidey-adjacent universe where Venom, Morbius, and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter take place).

The last we saw him, Eddie disappeared in a flash of white light, leaving a bartender (Ted Lasso‘s Cristo Fernández) grumbling about an unpaid bill and no tip. But Eddie did leave something behind: a small glob of the inky-black alien symbiote. Picking up where the Spider-Man: No Way Home mid-credits scene left off, Venom 3 trailer shows an unnamed military man (played by Doctor Strange‘s Chiwetel Ejiofor) at that same bar using a glass to contain the symbiote goo before the bartender — once again played by Fernández — can touch the alien parasite. 

This raises some questions. First, if Eddie left a piece of the Venom symbiote in the MCU in Spider-Man: No Way Home, how is it that the scene now seems to be set in the SSU in Venom: The Last Dance? Does the bar and the bartender exist in both the MCU and the SSU, and Eddie left identical pieces of symbiote when blipping back and forth between universes? Does any of this have anything to do with the multiversal switcheroo that brought the Vulture (Michael Keaton) face to face with the titular living vampire (Jared Leto) in Morbius?

Confusing matters further: Rhys Ifans, who played the Lizard in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, and who was one of the villains blipped to the MCU in Spider-Man: No Way Home, also appears in The Last Dance — not as one-armed scientist Dr. Curt Connors, but as a banjo-strumming bus hippie who gives the fugitive Eddie a lift to Las Vegas. While it’s common for actors to hop between cinematic universes, fans on X (formerly Twitter) are pointing out what seem to be discrepancies between the SSU and the MCU (which have become connected, albeit loosely, through the multiverse to which the Venom symbiote hivemind is connected).

All should be explained when Sony’s Venom 3 dances into theaters October 25.