Venom: Let There Be CarnageSave

1996. The St. Estes Home for Unwanted Children — a Catholic orphanage outside San Francisco. A teenage Cletus Kasady (Jack Bandeira at this age, in flashback) is being separated from the love of his life, Frances Barrison (Olivia-Mai Barrett as the teenage Frances), a young woman whose mutation generates lethal sonic screams. Frances is being transferred to the Ravencroft Institute — a confidential government holding facility for super-powered offenders — because her screams have killed two orphanage staffers and injured a third. Cletus, who has loved Frances since they were both eleven, can only watch through the orphanage's chain-link fence as armed transport agents drive her away. He vows revenge on whoever decided to take her. The first person on his list of revenge targets is a young transport agent named Patrick Mulligan (Stephen Graham as the adult version).

Present day. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is now living publicly as San Francisco's most-famous freelance investigative journalist, having been re-employed by his former network after the events of Venom (2018). He and Venom have been bonded for almost a year. They have been arguing constantly. Venom wants to eat live people — specifically, people Eddie thinks 'deserve it' but also frankly anyone Venom finds aesthetically displeasing. Eddie has been allowing Venom to eat chickens, lobsters, and the occasional violent criminal, which the symbiote finds insufficient. The two of them have been bickering for months. Eddie's apartment looks like a teenage hoarder lives there. He is exhausted.

A San Quentin Prison death-row interview. Detective Patrick Mulligan, now a senior SFPD detective, has been working a years-long unsolved-murders case and believes Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) — the serial killer who has been on death row for fifteen years — knows where the bodies of his many uncountable victims are buried. Eddie, given access to the death-row block by Mulligan in exchange for journalism cover, sits across the security glass from Cletus. Cletus, sensing something different about Eddie — sensing the alien presence inside him — speaks in riddles and verses. He bites Eddie's hand through the glass slot when Eddie passes him a photo of an old victim's family. A microscopic amount of Venom's symbiote tissue transfers into Cletus's bloodstream during the bite.

Cletus does not notice immediately. He is led back to his cell. Over the next forty-eight hours, the alien tissue grows and reproduces in his body. He develops the same superhuman strength and regenerative healing Eddie has been wielding for the past year. The symbiote that bonds with Cletus is hostile, hungry, and red. It does not name itself. Cletus calls it Carnage. By the third day, Carnage has consumed two of Cletus's death-row cellmates and Cletus has escaped the supermax facility through a hole he ripped in the concrete wall. He has only one destination: the Ravencroft Institute, where Frances has been held in solitary confinement for the past twenty-five years.

Eddie, meanwhile, has been struggling. Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) — his former fiancée from Venom (2018) — has gotten engaged to Dr. Dan Lewis (Reid Scott). She invites Eddie over to her new apartment to tell him in person. Eddie, blindsided, tries to be polite. Venom in his head is loudly making editorial comments about Dan's hairline and Anne's life choices, which Eddie occasionally and accidentally repeats out loud. Eddie leaves the apartment in a daze. He and Venom go home. They have a screaming-match argument about Anne, about chickens, about the symbiote's emotional needs. Venom storms out of Eddie's body and into the kitchen toaster. Eddie locks Venom in a glass aquarium overnight. The relationship is in crisis.

The next morning, Venom is gone. The symbiote has slipped out through the apartment ventilation system and is now hopping host to host across San Francisco — briefly inhabiting a parrot, a small dog, an elderly woman, and ultimately a younger nightclub bouncer named Mrs. Chen (the symbiote's first attempt at speech in this body is grammatically beautiful). Eddie, sensing his symbiote's emotional state, follows the trail of property damage and bewildered eyewitnesses across the Mission District. He eventually catches up to Venom at a punk-rock club where the symbiote has been DJing under the stage name 'Lethal Protector.' Venom is having the best night of its life. Eddie is having the worst.

Ravencroft Institute. Cletus / Carnage has freed Frances Barrison / Shriek (Naomie Harris) from her containment cell. Shriek's sonic-scream mutation has been refined over twenty-five years of confinement; she can now produce sonic frequencies precise enough to disable Carnage himself, which makes the lovers' reunion both passionate and complicated. They escape the facility together, killing several staff members in the process. Detective Mulligan is wounded during the breakout — Carnage stabs him through the chest, leaving him for dead in a Ravencroft corridor. (Mulligan survives. The blue-glowing-eyes that develop in his hospital recovery will become important in subsequent films, setting up his Toxin storyline for later SSU continuity.)

Cletus and Frances begin a cross-country crime spree, eating their way through a series of small-town gas stations and farmhouses in central California. They have one specific destination: a small cathedral on the outskirts of San Francisco where Cletus's mother had abandoned him as a child. Cletus wants to be married to Frances at this cathedral — by force if necessary — before he kills the priest who had originally turned Cletus over to the authorities thirty years earlier. The cathedral wedding becomes the film's third-act setpiece. Cletus has invited Eddie via mailed note as 'his best man'; Eddie has been told the wedding is happening by Detective Mulligan, who has just woken up from his coma with a vision of Cletus's plan.

Eddie cannot fight Carnage without Venom. He spends the morning of the wedding tracking his estranged symbiote across San Francisco. He finds Venom at Anne and Dan's apartment, where Venom has been hiding in the kitchen pantry feeling sorry for itself. Anne — once again proving herself the franchise's emotional anchor — has been negotiating between the two of them for the past forty-eight hours, acting as relationship mediator. She convinces Venom that Eddie genuinely loves him (in a way that suggests Anne knows the two of them are functionally a couple, which the film embraces explicitly). Venom transfers back into Eddie's body. The two of them are reconciled. They head for the cathedral.

The wedding scene is the film's structural centerpiece. Cletus and Frances are at the altar. A priest is being forced to officiate at gunpoint. Eddie crashes through the cathedral's stained-glass rose window, suspended on a Venom-extruded swing-line. The fight that follows is sixteen minutes of symbiote-on-symbiote combat — Venom (black, glossy) versus Carnage (red, jagged) — fighting up and down the cathedral's nave. The choreography is fully CGI-animated. Carnage is initially stronger; the red symbiote is larger and more aggressive. Eddie and Venom's compatibility-as-partners turns out to be their strategic advantage. The film's central thesis: the symbiote that can communicate with its host wins.

Frances / Shriek, meanwhile, has been firing sonic blasts at both symbiotes during the fight. Her blasts hit Carnage as often as they hit Venom, which is the moment Eddie realizes Carnage's weakness — high-frequency sound. Eddie deliberately maneuvers Carnage into the cathedral's giant bell, then convinces Venom to ring it. The bell's harmonics destabilize Carnage's molecular bonds. Carnage screams and partially detaches from Cletus's body. Venom, with Eddie's enthusiastic verbal encouragement, bites Carnage's exposed neck off — eating the red symbiote like a particularly long tongue-out reptile snack. Cletus, suddenly unprotected, collapses on the cathedral floor as a normal dying human. Shriek, distraught, kneels beside him. Cletus dies in her arms. Police, summoned by Detective Mulligan, surround the cathedral. Frances is captured.

The film's epilogue. Eddie and Venom have been on the run from the SFPD since the cathedral incident — Eddie was technically present at multiple murders, and the police don't quite buy his alien-symbiote defense. They drive south to a small beach in Baja California where Eddie buys a cold Corona and watches the sunset. Venom has been quietly contemplating its relationship with Eddie throughout the film. The two of them — boyfriend-and-boyfriend in everything but explicit dialogue — finally accept each other's presence permanently. The film closes with Eddie and Venom — together, finally settled into their codependent partnership — riding a stolen scooter along the Baja coast toward whatever the franchise's next chapter is.

The mid-credits scene. Eddie and Venom are in a Mexico motel watching television. The broadcast shows a news report revealing Tom Holland's Peter Parker's secret identity (the cliffhanger from Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) and the setup for Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)). Venom, recognizing the photograph of Spider-Man on screen, growls in fascinated recognition — implying that the Venom symbiote has racial memory of Spider-Man from the broader symbiote-Spider-Verse hierarchy. The scene's specific shimmer effect (the motel room briefly flickering) indicates the multiversal events of No Way Home have temporarily pulled Venom into the MCU universe. Eddie and Venom would briefly appear in No Way Home's mid-credits to cement this canonical bridge.

Commercial and critical aftermath. Venom: Let There Be Carnage grossed $507 million globally on a $110 million production budget — strong commercial success despite mixed critical reception (Rotten Tomatoes 58%, audience score 84%). The film's short 97-minute runtime, its comedic-tonal commitment, and Tom Hardy's dual performance as both Eddie and the Venom voice were widely cited by audience reviewers as the film's strengths. Critics generally felt the film was too tonally light for a Marvel-adjacent supervillain release. Director Andy Serkis has stated in interviews that he 'specifically committed to the comedic register' rather than the darker tone Sony had initially preferred. Sony has not invited Serkis back for any subsequent SSU project. Tom Hardy returned for Venom: The Last Dance (2024), which concluded the trilogy.