When "Venom: The Last Dance" rolls into theaters, it will conclude a trilogy of films that kicked off what seems to be a trend at Sony Pictures: Movies and stories set in a universe that’s adjacent to Spider-Man action, and focusing on Spider-Man villains, but they don’t include Spider-Man. This has allowed some of these films to take chances. Dakota Johnson’s "Madame Web," for example, told a bit of a prequel story that featured a newborn Peter Parker. Strange. And "Morbius…" well, Morbius did its own thing.
And so, too, did the Venom franchise, once it found its footing. These movies largely have been driven by Tom Hardy’s sensibilities. They lean into a physical comedy that Hardy seems to appreciate, and Venom: The Last Dance includes more of the unexpected than even its immediate predecessors. But when I got the chance to interview Hardy and his director Kelly Marcel about Venom: The Last Dance, I found out that their biggest challenge was more of a technical one, and it involved the visual effects used to bring the symbiote to life.
