The third and final entry in Tom Hardy’s Venom movie series is promising a lot of things—one last ride for Eddie Brock and his violent, symbiotic friend, the arrival of some pretty major cosmic Marvel foes, and intriguing new co-stars. But most importantly above all, it’s promising and delivering on one thing in particular: Venom Horse.
The Symbiote-clad equine superstar was the buzz of the internet when Venom: The Last Dance‘s first trailer dropped this past summer, and thankfully Sony showed that Venom Horse was going to live up to fan expectation when it debuted the full scene with the hijacked animal at New York Comic Con during its panel last night. Opening with Eddie and Venom on the run, the duo find a horse out in the desert tied up with no owner around. After arguing that “four legs are better than two,” Venom gleefully narrates Eddie’s attempts to sneak up on the animal before loudly declaring its presence as it takes over the creature, transforming into the glorious, goopy Venom Horse we saw in the trailer.
As Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” blares into the soundtrack, the Venom Horse goes pelting across the desert, dragging a hapless, screaming Eddie along for the ride as it speedly leaps and bounds over hills and through winding passage ways before finally coming to a stop at a river, giving Venom Horse a moment to hydrate and Eddie to lament over how he can’t feel his crotch any more after the bumpy ride. Their respite it short-lived however: a military aircraft comes soaring in behind them, blasting poor Venom Horse with a sonic attack that paralyzes the symbiote. Eddie is flung from the horse and into the river as masked soldiers begin rappelling down from the aircraft to try and capture Venom and dispose of Eddie entirely.
The latter begins struggling with one of the soldiers as they’re dragged along by the currents, while the former is almost entangled in a net by the rest of the squad. Eddie’s captor pulls a pistol on him in the struggle, almost shooting him in the chest, only for Eddie to successfully turn the gun around and pull the trigger himself—momentarily shocked by his actions as the soldier’s body begins to lifelessly float away from him. Meanwhile, Venom escapes captivity, leaping from taking over a nearby fish to a frog, before making his way back to Eddie in time for them both to go flying over a waterfall. As the remaining soldiers surround Venom/Eddie and begin shocking them with electric prods, we cut to the black-and-white echolocation of an unseen predator: a giant, four-legged, almost insectoid alien creature that neither Venom nor the soldiers want to tussle with.
As Venom and Eddie make their escape thanks to the distraction, the soldiers hopelessly engage the giant creature as it lashes out, grabbing them and grotesquely killing them. Overhead from the aircraft Chiwetel Ejiofor’s new villain, Rex Strickland (a familiar name from the comics, notably Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman’s Venom run), watches in horror as his men are killed. Pulling out a tablet, Strickland communicates with a research scientist Dr. Payne (Juno Temple). Relaying that his team failed to capture Venom due to the arrival of a dangerous new alien creature, Payne clinically asks Strickland if he can retrieve samples from the creature that’s just slaughtered his squad, leading him to throw the tablet down in disgust.
While the scene does a lot to tease the tensions to come in The Last Dance—Eddie and Venom on the run, the hostile relationship between Strickland and Payne, and of course, the arrival of alien foes from Venom’s homeworld Klyntar—of course the highlight was getting to see the Venom Horse in all its glory. It’s a fun reminder that these Venom movies, no matter the stakes, always have a ton of playful, silly fun at their heart, and we can’t see what else Eddie and Venom’s final ride has in store on that front when it hits theaters later this month on October 25.
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