Toxin: Does Venom's symbiote "grandson" appear in Venom: The Last Dance?
Oct. 25, 2024Is Stephen Graham playing the comics character?
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Venom: The Last Danceis out now, bringing the Tom Hardy-starring trilogy to a close. In the new film, Eddie and his symbiote are on the run, implicated in the death of Detective Mulligan (Stephen Graham) in the previous movie,Venom: Let There Be Carnage. As anyone who watched that film will know, however, Mulligan is not really dead. He survived his encounter with Carnage and now appears to be infected with a symbiote of his own…
This development has its roots inMarvel Comics, where Mulligan and his symbiote are a pretty major character: Toxin, the offspring of Carnage (who is, himself, the son of Venom!). So, does that mean that Toxin features in Venom: The Last Dance? The answer to that is actually a little complicated…
Spoilers for Venom: The Last Dance
Mulligan survives and does indeed transform into Toxin – a dark red symbiote. When Venom realizes that he’s broadly speaking “good” and unlikely to help him take down the webhead, however, he forms a temporary alliance with Carnage to destroy him. They fail when Spider-Man intervenes and, realising that his old life is over forever, Mulligan decides to leave his wife and young child behind for their own safety, pledging to try and use his symbiote for good.
That’s all very different to the character we see in Venom: The Last Dance. In the movie Mulligan is imprisoned in Area 55, the secret base underneath the decommissioned Area 51. When his symbiote eventually appears on screen he’s blue, rather than the red usually associated with Toxin, and that name is never spoken on screen. What’s more, he doesn’t act much like Toxin in the comics, who has a more youthful and lighthearted vibe. In the movie, Mulligan’s symbiote is all business until he is eventually killed by one of the Xenophages.
So, is Stephen Graham’s character in Venom: The Last Dance meant to be Toxin? The answer is: we don’t know, but probably not. It seems like Kelly Marcel (who wrote and directed the movie from a story that she developed with Tom Hardy) has taken the basic outline of the comics character – Mulligan is a cop who becomes infected with a symbiote – but gone in a completely different direction, similar to the way the Xenophages here are different to in the comics. That’s a shame, but at least there’s still the potential for Toxin to show up in a different film someday…
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Venom: The Last Dance is in theaters worldwide now. Check out our guide to theupcoming superhero moviesto add to your calendar, as well as how towatch the Spider-Man movies in order.
Will Salmon is the Comics Editor for GamesRadar/Newsarama. He has been writing about comics, film, TV, and music for more than 15 years, which is quite a long time if you stop and think about it. At Future he has previously launched scary movie magazine Horrorville, relaunched Comic Heroes, and has written for every issue of SFX magazine for over a decade. He sometimes feels very old, like Guy Pearce in Prometheus. His music writing has appeared in The Quietus, MOJO, Electronic Sound, Clash, and loads of other places and he runs the micro-label Modern Aviation, which puts out experimental music on cassette tape.
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