VenomSave

Space. A Life Foundation deep-space exploration probe is returning to Earth carrying biological samples from a comet — including four living alien specimens collected from the Kuiper belt. The samples are sealed in cryogenic containment pods. Halfway through atmospheric reentry over the Pacific, the craft breaks up. Cargo containers scatter across Indonesia. Three of the four pods are recovered by Life Foundation rescue teams and quietly flown to the company's San Francisco research compound. The fourth pod — containing a symbiote that would later name itself Riot — survives the crash, latches onto the Malaysian rescue paramedic Jameson, and begins jumping host to host across the globe heading for California. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), Life Foundation's billionaire founder, learns about the missing fourth specimen by satellite. He doesn't tell anyone.

San Francisco, six months later. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) hosts The Brock Report, a hard-hitting investigative news show on a respected local network. He's the guy networks send when a story has teeth — police corruption, corporate fraud, the things that make publicists nervous. He's also engaged to Anne Weying (Michelle Williams), a senior attorney at one of the city's most prestigious firms. Anne's current client is Life Foundation. Eddie is supposed to interview Carlton Drake about Life Foundation's philanthropy initiatives — a softball assignment his producer wants him to handle delicately.

Eddie does not handle it delicately. The night before the interview, he opens Anne's laptop on the kitchen counter and reads through confidential litigation files she's been preparing — files that describe Life Foundation human-trial deaths covered up across three years and four states. He goes into the interview the next morning and asks Carlton Drake about dead test subjects. Drake walks off. Within forty-eight hours: Eddie is fired. Anne is fired (for the leak that destroyed her firm's client relationship). Their engagement ends in a small Chinatown apartment with Anne calmly handing back her ring. Eddie watches her walk away from his window.

Six months further on. Eddie has been living in a one-room SRO and freelancing as a delivery driver. He drinks too much. He still tries to pitch stories to former editors who don't return his calls. Then Dr. Dora Skirth (Jenny Slate) — a Life Foundation researcher with a guilty conscience — knocks on his door one rainy night and tells him she can get him inside the compound. The human trials Eddie tried to expose are still happening. Worse, Life Foundation now has alien specimens. Skirth is going to lose her career over this; she just needs someone to break the story afterward.

The break-in goes wrong. Eddie locates the human-trial wing and recognizes a homeless woman from his old neighborhood strapped to a table — the woman attacks him in symbiote-induced rage and a pitched fight breaks out across the laboratory floor. The symbiote leaves her body during the struggle and seeps onto Eddie. He doesn't notice. He stumbles out of the building before security catches up, returns to his SRO, and collapses into bed with what he assumes is a fever. He wakes up the next morning able to hear someone breathing in the room. There is nobody else in the room.

The next twelve hours are a body-horror romantic comedy with one star. Eddie's body grows, twists, and snaps back. He eats raw tater tots out of an ashtray. He bites the head off a live lobster in a fine-dining restaurant Anne happens to be at with her new boyfriend Dr. Dan Lewis (Reid Scott). He climbs a wall in his underwear. He hears a deep voice in his head that calls him pathetic and asks for tots. The voice eventually introduces itself — sort of. It is the symbiote. It calls itself Venom. Venom does not particularly like Eddie but has decided Eddie is its host until further notice.

Anne, alarmed by the lobster restaurant episode, takes Eddie to Dan's hospital for an MRI. The machine's sonic frequency causes Venom intense pain — the symbiote shrieks audibly through Eddie's skull, panics the radiology techs, and forces Eddie to flee the hospital. He goes home, lies on his bathroom floor, and asks the voice in his head what it wants. Venom explains: its species is dying. Its planet is gone. It has been searching for compatible hosts across the galaxy. Eddie's body is one of the few human chemistries that does not violently reject the symbiote. They are, functionally, going to be roommates.

Meanwhile across town. Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed, in a $3,000 suit, demanding immediate results) has been merging another symbiote with another homeless test subject inside Life Foundation's compound. The symbiote — silver-colored, hostile, named Riot — kills the test subject within hours. Drake himself volunteers for the next attempt. Riot bonds with him willingly because Riot has been searching for a compatible host with planetary-scale authority. Drake, now Drake/Riot, intends to use Life Foundation's space launch program to retrieve the rest of the symbiote race from deep space and deliver them to Earth as a colonization fleet.

Eddie tries to bring the story to a former newspaper editor. Drake's mercenaries — led by the corporate security chief Treece (Scott Haze) — kick in his SRO door before he can. The fight that follows is the audience's first real look at Venom in costume: black, glossy, twelve feet tall, with a tongue and a permanent grin full of fangs. He devours Treece's lieutenant. He throws three other mercenaries through walls. He apologizes to Eddie for the violence afterward, kind of. The remaining mercenaries flee. Eddie now understands that he is bonded to an extraterrestrial weapon that views human bodies as food. He does not handle this well.

Anne and Dan find Eddie hiding in Anne's apartment shortly after. The reunion is awkward — Eddie is still in love with her, Dan is right there, and Venom keeps making editorial comments about both of them in Eddie's head that Eddie occasionally accidentally says out loud. But Anne, to her credit, listens. She watches a demonstration in her kitchen. She believes him. She agrees to help. She also extracts the symbiote from Eddie's body using the same MRI sonic frequency from earlier — not to harm Venom, but because Drake's security is closing in and Eddie is safer separated from the alien for the moment. Anne hides the symbiote inside her own body for the night.

Anne-as-Venom is one of the film's most-quoted single sequences. Anne walks into a hostage situation between Eddie and Treece. She kisses Eddie. The symbiote transfers between them mid-kiss. Eddie is back in costume in seconds and Treece becomes the second mercenary to find out what Venom does to human bodies firsthand. Eddie and Anne — newly reconciled, sort of, in the way exes reconcile when they need to save each other's lives from corporate mercenaries — head for the Life Foundation rocket-launch facility. Drake/Riot is already at the pad. The rocket is fueled. The countdown has started.

The final battle is twelve minutes of practical-and-CGI symbiote-on-symbiote combat aboard a rocket gantry. Venom and Riot grapple with extending tendrils through the launch tower. Drake is faster and stronger because Riot is a more aggressive symbiote and Drake is younger than Eddie. Eddie loses the fight on physical merits. The rocket launches with both symbiotes still aboard. Venom, having decided in the past forty-eight hours that he kind of likes humans and especially likes Eddie, talks his way through the gantry's electrical systems and causes a fuel-tank ignition mid-ascent. The rocket explodes in mid-air. Drake and Riot are killed in the blast. Venom appears to be killed too — Eddie lands on the launch pad alone, no voice in his head, his body intact but his roommate apparently incinerated.

The film closes with Eddie at his old SRO apartment trying to write the Drake story for what's left of his journalism career. A small black tendril emerges from his fingers as he types. Venom had transferred briefly to Anne earlier in the film and then back to Eddie during the final kiss — he has been hiding inside Eddie's body silently for the entire epilogue, waiting to surprise his host. Eddie is delighted in the way someone is delighted when their not-quite-friend who they thought was dead turns out to have just been napping in their bloodstream. The two of them — Eddie, and the alien who lives in Eddie — decide together to go get something to eat. Venom suggests a man down the street who looks like he deserves it. Eddie agrees, sort of. The character arc is complete.

The mid-credits scene introduces Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) in a maximum-security prison cell. Kasady is a serial killer with red curly hair and a Texas accent. He tells Eddie — in for an interview — that when he gets out, there's going to be 'carnage.' This setup becomes the spine of Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), where Harrelson's character bonds with the Carnage symbiote and becomes the franchise's primary antagonist. The post-credits scene is a black-and-white animated sequence introducing audiences to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which would release theatrically two months after Venom.