The movie starts off with a private corporation discovering alien life. This completely upends several decades of alien encounter tropes by making a private corporation the first organized point of contact instead of a government entity.
We skip forward several months and are introduced to our gonzo anti-hero Tom Hardy confronting billionaire pharmaceutical CEO Not-Bezos about an undisclosed lawsuit over his reckless abandon in pursuing human trials that have a high death rate.
Well, for this courageous act of journalism, his boss reinforms him that
mass media passes through corporate filters ("No one is above the network, Eddie"), Tom Hardy is fired, and so is his girlfriend (who was a defense attorney working for Not-Bezos), and she breaks up with him. The lesson here is that if you even think about challenging the rich and powerful, you will lose everything, including your loved ones, and she will start dating a rich doctor.
Six months later Not-Bezos begins kidnapping homeless people off of the street to experiment on them to death with the aliens he discovered in order to transcend human limits. In this way he is also Not-Thiel.
For most of the movie the main obstacle Venom has are militarized police and private defense contractors. Venom even has to deal with
drones:
The main villain is motivated by
climate change. This is literally the only Marvel movie that mentions climate change.
