No Way Home’ mid-credits scene, explained

Given what happened at the very end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Eddie Brock is a surprising no-show for most of Spider-Man: No Way Home. That is until the mid-credits scene. 

There, Eddie (Tom Hardy) sits at a beachside bar, hearing all about Thanos’ quest for the Infinity Stones and subsequent “snappening” — aka The Blip — from a flustered bartender (Ted Lasso‘s Cristo Fernández). The scene concludes with Eddie getting zapped out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Earth-199999 in the same way as No Way Home‘s other multiversal visitors.

That means Eddie is (probably) back at home in his own corner of the multiverse. But there’s much more to this scene than tying up the loose end of his MCU arrival in the first place.

Let’s start with the most obvious thing, that final moment. After Eddie winks away, we get a close-up of the “tip” he left behind on the bar: A tiny drop of symbiote goo. The suggestion is that something resembling Venom is going to appear in the life of Tom Holland’s Peter Parker.

Marvel’s relationship with Sony is poised to continue well past the now-complete trilogy of Holland-led Spider-Man films. And while Spider-Man: No Way Home concludes with order seemingly restored to the multiverse, the chaos at the center of its story could always spring up again. 

The multiversal chaos at the center of the story in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” could always spring up again.

Also, don’t forget the biggest Venom: Let There Be Carnage surprise of all: The symbiote we call Venom is part of a hive mind that spans the entire multiverse. Every symbiote everywhere draws from a shared pool of knowledge.

What we didn’t know back in October when Carnage premiered is the universe switch we witness in the mid-credits scene is a direct result of what happens in No Way Home. Venom is transported into the MCU, along with a host of other familiar faces, because of a Doctor Strange incantation gone horribly wrong.

Think about that spell for a minute, and how it worked. The idea was to make everyone forget Peter Parker’s connection to Spider-Man. But the spell goes haywire. As a result, beings with direct knowledge of Peter’s secret identity from across the multiverse are pulled in.

Tom Hardy’s Venom hasn’t ever met Peter in person. They live in separate universes, and there’s been no indication across two films that the Hardyverse Venom has dealt with any kind of Spider-Man, or that one even exists in its own corner of the multiverse. Yet Venom still has that moment of recognition in Carnage where he sees a costumed Peter on TV.

The rules of the MCU’s multiverse are still taking shape at this point, but we can draw a few important conclusions here. First, the Hardyverse Venom may not have ever met Parker, but there’s a glimmer of recognition somewhere in the symbiote’s hive mind. Given No Way Home‘s very direct links to the Tobey Maguire-led Spider-Man 3, it stands to reason that the earlier movie’s Venom, played by Topher Grace, is a source of that recognition.

Credit: Courtesy of Sony Pictures

This also potentially tells us something crucial about the symbiote hive mind as a whole. It’s possible that the ancient alien exists outside the boundaries of the “forget Peter Parker” spell that Doctor Strange successfully casts at the end of No Way Home. 

We can’t know for sure because Venom’s flash of recognition happens before it gets snapped back to the Hardyverse in the latest Spider-Man. But if the hive mind is unaffected by Strange’s magic, that means there’s still a being with knowledge of Peter’s secret identity in Earth-199999, and it happens to be a bloodthirsty alien.

Strange himself declares early in No Way Home that we know “frightfully little” about the multiverse. After screwing up that first spell so badly, he could easily have messed up the second spell too. But it’s also entirely possible that the symbiote hive mind is so ancient and so spread out across the multiverse that it exists beyond the reach of Strange’s magic.

Beyond that, No Way Home‘s mid-credits scene ends with the explicit development of a symbiote having arrived on the MCU’s version of Earth. Does some other version of Eddie Brock exist there just like there are other Peter Parkers? We don’t know that. But there are other MCU characters who we do know that have taken on the mantle of Venom in the comics.

One is Mac Gargan, who we met during the mid-credits scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming. In the comics, Gargan is the human alter-ego of Spider-Man villain the Scorpion, and the Homecoming scene suggests a similar path ahead. Could Gargan have a future date with the MCU symbiote as well?

The second is a bit more left-field: Malekith. The dark elf antagonist of Marvel’s much-maligned Thor: The Dark World spent a bit of time with the Venom symbiote himself. Sure, Malekith died at the end of Thor 2. But death is never permanent in the comics and it hasn’t always been permanent in the MCU, either.

The symbiote also has much looser and more temporary links in the comics to a range of other familiar MCU faces, including Groot, Rocket, Drax, Ms. Marvel, and Mysterio. But I’d say the likeliest candidate for a potential symbiote takeover is Flash Thompson. 

Portrayed by a scene-stealing Tony Revolori, Flash has been a key player in all of Holland’s Spidey adventures. He’s generally been sidelined in favor of Peter and his two actual besties, MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon). But Flash has been a constant in this version of Peter Parker’s life. And his obsession with Spider-Man could make him a great fit for this dark mantle. 

Marvel is gearing up for its own cross-universe deep dive in 2022’s Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Spider-Man is coming back at some point as well. We’ll get clarity on some or all of these questions eventually. But it’s clear that Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s mid-credits scene is doing more than teasing the symbiote’s arrival in the MCU.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is now in theaters.