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The Symbiote That Ate Hollywood
Somewhere in a conference room at Warner Bros., someone's head is in their hands.
Venom: The Last Dance just rolled through the 2024 box office like a gelatinous, fang-toothed wrecking ball — and the numbers don't care about your feelings. Seventh highest-grossing Hollywood film of the year. Worldwide. Out-grossing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, outlasting Black Adam, and doing it all without a single Avenger in sight.
Meanwhile, DC has been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic for years now, and the icebergs aren't even the problem anymore. The problem is they keep building new ships with no destination.
Sony Played the Long Game Nobody Saw Coming
Here's what nobody expected: Sony, of all studios — the studio that once made The Emoji Movie — would become the dark horse of the superhero genre. And not through polish or prestige or a meticulously planned shared universe. No. Through sheer, glorious weirdness.
The Venom franchise works because it doesn't try to be anything else. It knows what it is: a buddy-comedy horror-action film about a middle-aged journalist sharing his body with an alien parasite who communicates through internal screaming and has a fondness for lobster. That's it. That's the pitch. Sony leaned hard into that absurdity, and audiences rewarded them for it.
This is what makes The Last Dance hit so differently. Eddie and Venom aren't heroes in any traditional sense. They're two disasters who accidentally save the world while arguing about breakfast. There's no manufactured gravitas, no moody monologues about the weight of power. When the symbiote says "We are Venom," it's genuinely exciting — not because the line is profound, but because it's unhinged in exactly the right way.
The MCU trained audiences to expect connective tissue, post-credit breadcrumbs, lore drops. Sony said "nope" and made a franchise where you can walk in cold and still have a great time. That's a flex.
DC Can't Catch a Break — Or a Direction
Let's talk about the elephant in the room, or rather, the elephant that keeps getting rebooted before anyone can finish naming it.
DC's cinematic struggles aren't new. But Black Adam crystallized something the studio refused to acknowledge: audiences aren't automatically show up just because there's a DC logo on the poster. The Rock flexed his way through a $200 million movie that felt like a corporate obligation rather than a story anyone was burning to tell. The Flash had Ezra Miller doing their best across-multiple-eras multiverse shtick while the whole thing quietly collapsed under the weight of behind-the-scenes chaos. Blue Beetle was actually good — genuinely — and nobody watched it.
This is the pattern. Every few months, DC announces a new plan. A hard reset. A fresh start. James Gunn gets brought in to save everything. Someone else gets fired. The plan changes. The fans get excited. The movie underperforms. The cycle continues.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom limped across the finish line like a waterlogged golden retriever. And now Venom 3 — sorry, The Last Dance — just casually strolls past all of it, eatingtakeout in the timeframe DC takes to hold a meeting about holding a meeting.
The Lesson Nobody in Hollywood Wants to Learn
Here's what the Venom phenomenon actually proves, and it's uncomfortable for the big studios:
Audiences aren't loyal to universes. They're loyal to characters.
People didn't show up for Venom 3 because Sony had a master plan. They showed up because Tom Hardy made Venom lovable — weird, terrifying, and weirdly lovable — in the first film, and that emotional hook carried through three movies. The symbiote has personality. It has wants, quirks, a dramatic flair for chaos. It's a character you can actually invest in, not a plot device walking around in a cape.
DC has had decades of incredible source material. Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman — these are arguably the three most iconic fictional characters ever created. And yet, somehow, a goopy space blob with a taste for heads has become more cinematically relevant.
That should sting. It should sting a lot.
What Comes Next Is anyone's Guess
The DCEU — what's left of it — is supposedly getting a clean slate under the new DC Studios leadership. New gods, new timelines, new hopes. Maybe it'll work. Maybe the Gunn-Safran era will deliver something that finally clicks with audiences the way Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy once did.
But for now, the symbiote has the floor.
And honestly? While DC spends the next five years figuring out what its universe means, I'm going to go rewatch Eddie and Venom arguing about whether humans are food or friends. That's a better use of two hours than sitting through another studio presentation about "the future of the franchise."
Some battles, you just have to admit you've lost.
The symbiote won this round.
