Tom Hardy’s Venom Movies Ranked According To Rotten Tomatoes

If superhero movies are a family, then “Venom” is definitely the eccentric cousin. Sony’s trilogy of films star Tom Hardy as investigative journalist Eddie Brock, and also as the voice of Venom, the alien symbiote that Eddie has “up [his] ass” (to use his own phrasing). It’s definitely an unconventional domestic partnership, but there’s a unique charm to it.

All three “Venom” movies have received mixed reviews, but some critics have been positively enchanted by the trilogy’s messy-but-entertaining energy. On the audience side, “Venom” and “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” both received B+ CinemaScore grades, based on opening day audience polling (the same score as Marvel Cinematic Universe entry “Thor” and DC movies like “Suicide Squad” and “Justice League”). More recently, “Venom: The Last Dance” broke that trend by earning a B- CinemaScore.

That pattern is different in the Rotten Tomatoes scores for the three moves, which reflect the balance of positive vs. negative reviews from movie critics. All opinions are subjective, of course, but here’s how the “Venom” movies rank according to Rotty T’s. 

It might come as a shock to learn that Ruben Fleischer’s “Venom” has the worst Rotten Tomatoes score of the trilogy. The odds were certainly stacked against it, as many fans thought the project was a complete non-starter. Venom’s origin story in the comics (loosely adapted in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 3”) is that the symbiote attaches to Peter Parker first, gets rudely discarded by him, and latches on to Eddie Brock on the rebound. Eddie and Venom bond over their shared loathing of Spider-Man, and in the classic Marvel comics, the character was more or less defined by his antagonism towards Spider-Man. So, a Venom movie with no Spider-Man sounded like a recipe for disaster.

Instead, it was a pleasant surprise — thanks mainly to Tom Hardy fully embracing the weirdness of the main characters and their bizarre dynamic. Instead of trying to look cool, he played the possessed Eddie as a sweaty mess who at one point climbs into a restaurant’s lobster tank to cool down, and then starts eating one of the lobsters raw (the lobster tank moment from “Venom” was Hardy’s idea).

“Venom” may have been helped by the low expectations audiences had going into it. By leaning into the absurdity of the premise and the chemistry between Eddie and Venom, the movie turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Still, it definitely has its flaws, so perhaps it’s not surprising that only 30% of critics gave it a passing grade.

“Venom: The Last Dance” marked the directorial debut of Kelly Marcel, the screenwriter behind all three “Venom” movies, who worked closely with Hardy on the stories for the last two. Asked by People why she decided to step into the director’s role for this movie, Marcel replied: “Sony asked me to and I was like, ‘Oh, okay then.'”

After the positive response to the oddly romantic aspects of “Venom,” Hardy and Marcel doubled down on them in the sequels. Though, rather than exploring the idea of a sexual relationship between man and symbiote (fan art has that covered), the movies instead began to portray Eddie and Venom as a bickering old married couple. “Venom: The Last Dance” bore the tagline “Til death do they part” and the trailers threatened the possibility of either a death or (perhaps even worse) a break-up.

Though “The Last Dance” gets the silver trophy according to its Rotten Tomatoes score, both the CinemaScore and the general discussion surrounding the movie indicate that this is the weakest link in the trilogy. As is so often the case with movie trilogies (see: “Star Wars,” “The Godfather,” and — of course — “Spider-Man”), the middle chapter is the best one.

Though it still technically has a “Rotten” score of 57% (just shy of the 60% threshold for “Fresh”), “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” has the best reviews of the trilogy by a significant margin — and with good reason. Building on what was great about “Venom,” the second movie gets even weirder and more chaotic, while still remaining grounded in its characters and their (often toxic) relationships. 

The titular Carnage (whose name almost didn’t make it into the film’s title) is Venom’s baby, who is accidentally conceived and birthed when Eddie gets bitten by convicted killer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson). While still unaware of what they’ve unleashed on the world, Eddie and Venom’s bickering (over issues like whether or not they should bite people’s heads off) escalates into a very strange brawl, followed by a melodramatic break-up.

“Let There Be Carnage” embraces the idea of human-symbiote bonds being an analogy for LGBTQ relationships: Eddie treats Venom like something to be ashamed of; Venom doesn’t like that, and declares that he is “coming out of the Eddie closet.” Fortunately, by the end of the movie they realize that they’re meant to be together. It’s fun, it’s goofy, and the villains are a lot more interesting this time around. “Let There Be Carnage” is peak “Venom.”