When the most recent promotional material for Venom: The Last Dance dropped, fans got a glimpse of grisly-looking, symbiote-hunting baddie. There have been a few fan theories as to which character it could be, with Grendel being a fairly popular choice. Instead, it turns out that this is one of the original symbiote hunters — a race of aliens known as xenophage. One of them, nicknamed Phage, was an antagonist in the mostly-forgotten 1996 miniseries Venom: The Hunted. That story centered on the Venom symbiote being hunted by xenophage, an interstellar predator race who consider symbiotes a delicacy.
They’re pretty ugly-looking spuds in their natural forms (not like the symbiotes are cute and cuddly), but the xenophage are also shapeshifters (at least in the comics). In one instance, a xenophage that was hunting Venom disguised itself as a piece of furniture, so they aren’t limited to just living beings, either.
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Apparent confirmation that the creature in the trailer is a xenophage comes from fan account The Venom Site on social media, where they shared an image of what appears to be a t-shirt featuring the character and a graffiti-style “Xenophage” label.
Xenophages particularly like eating symbiote brains, but will also sometimes eat other brains if there isn’t a symbiote handy. In Venom: The Hunted, the title works on two levels because one such murder of a human lands Venom in the police crosshairs while the xenophage who did the actual murder works to track down Venom on its own.
Created by G.I. Joe legend Larry Hama and Man of Action Studios’ Duncan Rouleau, the xenophage is kind of a footnote in Marvel’s (and Venom’s) history, having only really played a key role in Venom: The Hunted. It isn’t immediately clear how much of the Venom: The Hunted story might carry over here, or if the xenophage is just being used a kind of generic alien army for Knull, in the vein of what the Chitauri were for Loki and Thanos in The Avengers.
What does seem likely is that the xenophage in the movie will be actively hunting Venom in specific. In Venom: The Hunted, the Planet of the Symbiotes event had just happened in Spider-Man titles, and Marvel had a lot of symbiotes chilling on Earth who could be targeted. More generally, Earth was inherently a target because of how many symbiotes kept finding their way to the world. In Venom, there aren’t quite as many of them camped out here (although maybe that can change before The Last Dance starts).
“These things [usually] come in threes,” Hardy had told Digital Spy shortly before Venom 3 became official. “If there’s going to be a new one – and they depend heavily on the success of each individual one, so you can’t count on them ever happening again – every one has got to be as if it was the last one. But I think it’s really important, if you go into something, thinking that one, two and three are the same… the same story, the same film. So that you don’t surprise yourself by being caught out by suddenly having to do a third from nowhere. There’s got to be some continuity into a third and fourth and fifth, and if somebody says ‘no’, that’s fine. Let it go, and you move on to something else.”
Venom: The Last Dance will be directed by Kelly Marcel (Fifty Shades of Grey), who wrote and produced the first two Venom movies alongside Tom Hardy; Marcel is also writing the script of the third film. Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Amy Pascal, and Hutch Parker will all produce alongside Marcel and Hardy.
