Venom 3 trailer shows off its big bad: The God of Symbiotes

Susana Polo is a senior entertainment writer at Polygon, specializing in pop culture and genre fare, with a primary expertise in comic books. Previously, she founded The Mary Sue.

We’ve got just over a month until Venom: The Last Dance premiers, and a new trailer for the finale of Tom Hardy’s symbiote saga reveals the perfect end boss for Eddie and Venom’s bromance. The name might not raise an eyebrow to the casual or old school Venom fan, but he’s a natural villain straight out of Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman’s record-busting run on Venom: Knull, the King in Black.

Introduced in the late 2010s by Cates and Stegman, Knull is the ancient god of darkness and void who created the Symbiotes as weapons in his war on Marvel Comics’ creator gods, the Celestials, because for every star and world and mote of life they created, his realm of pure void shrank. He was a cosmic existential threat, until he got his clock soundly cleaned by a young Thor, and the Symbiotes seized on his momentary weakness to rebel against their own god’s mind control, forming millions of their own bodies into a gigantic spherical prison — the Symbiote homeworld.

Knull was the shadowy, growing threat of Cates and Stegman’s 2018 run on Venom, until he came to really raise hell — he had a wicked Symbiote sword and an army of mind-controlled Symbiote dragons and a real heavy metal album cover style. Marvel’s King in Black crossover event sold like gangbusters and was big and stylish and fun, so it’s no wonder that Last Dance writer and director Kelly Marcel would look to it for a blow-out finale to this bizarre superhero franchise.