Venom: The Last Dance trailer picks up after all those wacky multiverse post-credits teases

Venom 3, cheekily subtitled the The Last Dance, looks like a splashy payoff to one of the superhero movie era’s weirder franchises. Tom Hardy is back as Eddie Brock and on the run from some gun-toting scientists who believe the Venom symbiote must be eradicated for the sake of Earth. Crossing my fingers this is The Fugitive / Midnight Run with a Venom horse.

Venom: The Last Dance appears to pick up where we left Eddie and Venom in Venom: Let There Be Carnage: lying low in the tropics after killing serial killer Cletus and leaving detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham) infected with his own symbiote. But if you are a total dork about this stuff, you might be wondering: Hey, didn’t Eddie and Venom cross over into the Marvel Cinematic Universe in a post-credits tease at the end of Let There Be Carnage? Yes, they did! At least that’s what appeared to happen, a theoretical connection to Doctor Strange’s multiversal spell in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

But in the end, only Andrew Garfield’s and Tobey Maguire’s previous Spider-Mans showed up in the crossover movie — no Venom. In fact, Marvel went so far as to undo the whole tease. A post-credits scene in No Way Home saw Eddie grumbling at a bar over his multiverse displacement, only to be immediately transported back to his walled-off Sony-Marvel timeline in a flash. Nothing mattered! Wild.

So here we are, The Last Dance, with Eddie and Venom back where they started: on the run, biting heads, and amped for more black-goo hijinks. There are some out-there rumors on dubious corners of the internet that Eddie might somehow might be on the hunt for a 10-year-old Peter Parker, but the trailer pretty much dispels the post-credits-inspired hope. We do get a tease of Mulligan’s transformation into Toxin, and while Chiwetel Ejiofor shows up as a big bad, he’s not playing Karl Mordo from Doctor Strange — just some dude in army fatigues who likely bonds with a symbiote for a final fight. Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple is also in the cast, and is also rumored to do some symbioting.

Venom: The Last Dance, which does not take place in the MCU timeline, is out on Oct. 25.