TOM HARDY WRAPS UP HIS ALIEN BROMANCE TRILOGY

One of the fun jokes in the Venom series is that Tom Hardy, who plays Marvel Comics character Eddie Brock in the movie franchise, is also lending his magisterial, id-driven voice to Venom, the mayhem-frequent symbiote alien who's locked inside him.

- SCOTT GARCEAU

So Hardy's talking to himself up there onscreen most of the time.

Venom is an outlier from the MCU, sometimes crossing over with Peter Parker and Spider-Man (through Sony Pictures) via those pesky post-credit sequences. In that sense, the three Venom movies have some latitude to play around as much as they want, and that makes them a somewhat guilty pleasure. Laughs and carnage arrive in equal measure. Sure, it's fun to see Hardy play regular guy Eddie, an investigative journalist on the run since 2018's Venom. Hardy, a fan of the comics, can slip into a likeably average American simulacrum as easily as his character morphs into Venom—a sometimes tetchy, punctilious alien who's prone to the simple pleasures of Earth life, like gazing at the Statue of Liberty and eating human bad guys whole.