Venom Villain Knull May Have A Marvelous Future
Various Marvel movie universes may be merging, and this fall’s Venom: The Last Dance looks like the place where it’ll start. Well, kind of; it already started with Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it’ll center around Spidey and Venom. The final trailer for Venom: The Last Dance (embedded below) and an IGN interview with director Kelly Marcel reveal that the ultimate villain of the upcoming film will be Knull, the god of the symbiotes and “King in Black.” Knull is a relatively recent creation, having been introduced in Marvel Comics in 2018, although he was retroactively inserted into earlier stories like “The Saga of Gorr the God Butcher.” He’s an insanely powerful cosmic entity who created the symbiotes like the one that bonded to Eddie Brock and formed Venom. According to Marcel, while Knull is the ultimate evil in Venom: The Last Dance, he isn’t the film’s central antagonist, instead remaining in the background to more fully emerge down the line – as Marcel puts it, “the threat lurking behind the danger.” She later says that, while this is the last Venom movie with Tom Hardy, “more symbiote stories” are coming, and Knull will return.
Where could Knull possibly return if this is the end of the line for Sony’s Venom series? The evidence points to Spider-Man 4, or whatever Marvel decides to call Tom Holland’s next outing as the web-slinger. A month ago, Alex Perez of Cosmic Book News wrote about Knull’s possible emergence in Spider-Man 4, which ties into the mid-credits scene from No Way Home. If you’ll remember, that scene featured Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock having been brought to the MCU via Spidey and Doctor Strange’s spell and, when it was done, being sent back to his world. However, he left behind a small chunk of the Venom symbiote, which slowly crawled away. Perez posits that this could catch Knull’s attention and bring him to the MCU, where he’ll try to, as Perez puts it, “enshroud the entire multiverse in his darkness.” There are a couple of possibilities Perez allows for: either Tom Hardy’s Venom will cross into the MCU, or the Venom symbiote that stayed behind in No Way Home will bond with that world’s Eddie Brock and create the MCU version of Venom. Either way, it’ll be Spider-Man and Venom vs. Knull, with the fate of the multiverse in the balance. In a Q&A from a few days ago (other parts of which I talk about here), Perez says that Spider-Man 4 is looking “more multiversal than street” and will feature “more symbiotes.”
So, they’re just eschewing the whole “Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man” they set up at the end of No Way Home, huh? This really annoys me; I don’t mind getting into Venom, Knull, and the symbiotes down the line, but I was all set for some more grounded Spider-Man adventures. This is the exact wrong lesson to learn from No Way Home’s success; it didn’t succeed because of the multiverse but in spite of it, as evinced by the rest of the Multiverse Saga. And they’re fast-forwarding through Peter’s development as Spider-Man once again, this time with Venom, especially if Tom Hardy’s version is the one who shows up in Spider-Man 4. Just like with the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, and the rest of the Sony holdovers from No Way Home, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man is going to meet a fully-formed version of one of his greatest villains, and he’ll have no personal relationship with him. Even if they manage to give Holland’s Spidey his own Venom, they’re skipping all the way to Knull immediately rather than letting Spidey face Venom, encounter Carnage, have Venom become the Lethal Protector, etc. They seem to think comic books were created in 2015. But at this point, it’s no use complaining; despite these rumors of a reset and Deadpool’s joke about how much the concept sucks in Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel refuses to let the multiverse go. All we can do now is hope it’s at least a fun ride.
Let us know what you think of Knull being in Venom: The Last Dance and possibly Spider-Man 4 in the comments!
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