This week, one of the great big screen romance stories of the 21st century is set to write its final chapter in cinemas. Venom: The Last Dance is being sold as the conclusion of the story of journalist Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his turbulent experience as the host for the alien symbiote with a taste for human heads known as Venom. Okay, it’s not technically a romance as far as the actual movies are concerned, but come on.

The genius of these movies is in how much fun they have with the unlikely bond between Eddie, who continues to show that he was massively weird even without an alien sharing his body, and his bloodthirsty alter ego. They’re still antagonistic and still unlikely bedfellows, but there’s no denying their love for each other now.

In the first trailer for Venom: The Last Dance, there are a handful of lines that ominously suggest either one or both of them might not make it to the end of the movie. “We may not make it out of this alive, buddy,” says Eddie. “The time has come, Eddie,” says Venom. Even the poster tagline is “til death do they part”, again hinting at the romantic edge to their relationship, as well as a potentially fatal conclusion. Are we all actually about to cry at a Venom movie?

Watch: Trailer for Venom: The Last Dance

When Venom movie first arrived on the big screen in solo movie form, it didn’t seem likely that we’d get here — a threequel framed as a high-stakes victory lap. Venom showed up in 2018 as the first entry of a rather odd cinematic project. This marked the beginning of Sony’s attempts to create a shared universe of superhero movies around the rights to Spider-Man, without using the webslinger given his long-term loan to Marvel Studios.

Read more: ‘Venom’ Star Tom Hardy ‘Would Love to Fight Spider-Man’ (Variety, 4 min read)

It’s fair to say that the appetite for this wasn’t high. How could a Spider-Man villain lead a movie without Spider-Man in it? The first reactions didn’t help, with critics savaging the film. Some compared it to other Marvel-adjacent duds like Elektra, while its Rotten Tomatoes approval score even now stands at just 30%.

But then, people started to go to see it — and they just kept going. Venom earned $856m (£657m) at the global box office, ahead of other superhero outings like Ant-Man and the Wasp and Deadpool 2. By the end of 2018, Venom 2 was officially on the way, paying off the post-credits tease of Woody Harrelson as Venom’s comic book arch-enemy Carnage.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage, released in 2021 as one of the first big movies after the pandemic lockdowns, leaned in to everything fans loved about the original film. The Venom franchise doesn’t take itself at all seriously, delighting in the absurdity of its marauding alien beasties and outrageously heightened human characters.

But at the core of it all remained the relationship between Eddie and Venom. Let There Be Carnage is essentially an odd couple romcom as the two adjust to their intimate living arrangements and find a way to fight alongside each other. Alongside all of the silliness, there’s an emotional core — even though that core is a relationship between a troubled human and an erratic alien psychopath.

Read more: Tom Hardy shares how Venom: Let There Be Carnage reacted to savage reviews (Yahoo Entertainment, 3 min read)

Audiences have thrown their arms around these characters and around Hardy’s performance. At a time when the Infinity Saga of the MCU was coming to an end in epic, heavy fashion, Venom provided the lighter side of the superhero world. Comic books can run the emotional gamut from serious to stupid and everything in between, so adaptations should also reflect that spectrum.

That’s certainly where Venom sits. And with the box office success of both the first film and Let There Be Carnage — which managed $507m (£390m) worldwide at a time when multiplexes were still in recovery mode — there was no doubt that Venom would return for a third outing. The character had a brief dalliance with the MCU around the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home but, ultimately, he’s still marching to the beat of his own drum.

Read more: Marvel fans left frustrated as Venom 3 trailer ‘ruins’ Spider-Man: No Way Home scene (The Independent, 3 min read)

That drum, though, could beat for the final time in Venom: The Last Dance. The silliest and most unlikely superhero franchise in Hollywood is winding up for its final entry and it will be a delight to see that freak flag fly one last time. This has been an unforgettable love story packed with body-swapping, head-munching, and alien invaders. A tale as old as time.

Venom: The Last Dance is in UK cinemas from 25 October.