Warning: Full spoilers follow for Venom: Let There Be Carnage. If you just want to know how many end credits scenes there are in Venom, we’ll tell you right here: There is one mid-credits scene.

Read on if you want all the spoilery details on it.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (read our review) has finally arrived, and it’s a zany, over-the-top journey into symbiote madness. Directed by Andy Serkis, and starring Tom Hardy once again as both Eddie Brock and his alter ego Venom, the film is as much a break-up comedy as it is a superhero movie. And yet, Serkis and Sony Pictures (and Hardy presumably, who is also a producer on the film) are sure to leave the audience wanting more with that age-old Marvel trick… the post-credits scene. And it’s a big one.

But what exactly happens after the credits of Venom 2? And how many end-credits scenes are there? Read on…

How Many End Credits Are in Venom 2?

Venom: Let There Be Carnage has just one post credits scene, but as Ned Ryerson might say, it’s a doozy.

After Venom/Eddie Brock dispatch Cletus Kasady/Carnage (Woody Harrelson) and Shriek/Frances Barrison (Naomie Harris), the bonded pair seems to basically retire to a beachfront life, away from the hustle and bustle of San Francisco — and all the people Venom might want to eat, and all the cops who might want to arrest them.

The credits roll on Venom 2 as Eddie is sitting on the beach, but then we get a mid-credits scene involving none other than Tom Holland’s Spider-Man and, apparently, the MCU!

Spider-Man in Let There Be Carnage

Fans have been waiting for this moment for ages, and it’s finally here: The MCU version of Spider-Man is now poised to meet up with the Tom Hardy Venom. And the set-up is all here in Venom 2’s credits scene.

Eddie/Venom are now resting in their hotel room watching TV, when Venom tells Eddie that he is ancient and has seen things that Eddie couldn’t comprehend, like other universes. He offers to show Eddie a quick glimpse of these experiences, and suddenly the room sort of blinks out around them and they find themselves in a nicer, quite different hotel room. And on the TV is none other than J. Jonah Jameson (J. K. Simmons) outing Peter Parker as Spider-Man, just as we saw at the end of Spider-Man: Far From Home. (Though it should be noted that it’s not the exact same scene from Far From Home. Presumably Jameson just keeps hate-broadcasting about Spidey/Peter Parker constantly.)

It appears that somehow Eddie has been transported to the MCU. Or maybe it’s a variant timeline that has both Tom Holland’s Spidey and Tom Hardy’s Venom in it? But no other MCU heroes? It’s impossible to say, because the scene ends so quickly (with Venom licking the TV and being very interested in Spidey, before the proper resident of that universe’s hotel room exits the bathroom and asks a befuddled Eddie what he’s doing there).

Did Venom, in trying to show Eddie a bit of his vast galactic experience, transport Eddie to the MCU? Or did whatever it is that Doctor Strange is up to in the Spider-Man: Far From Home trailer actually pull Eddie into the MCU, just as it is apparently doing with Doc Ock and other Spidey characters from non-MCU films? We know the multiverse of the MCU is a thing now thanks to the events of Loki, and as depicted in What If…? And it seems like there’s a chance that we’ll at least see Venom in Far From Home, if only in a cameo.

Detective Patrick Mulligan in Venom 2: Will He Become the Toxin Symbiote?

In a word, yes.

Detective Mulligan is a guest at the unholy wedding of Shriek and Carnage at the film’s climax, and he winds up in a tussle with Shriek that goes very badly for both parties in the end. The prologue to the film tells us that Mulligan, as a young cop, shot and blinded Shriek in one eye, and she gets her revenge in the present day when she attempts to gouge one of his eyes out and hangs him.

He’s seemingly left for dead. But later, after the battle between Carnage and Venom has ended, we see that Mulligan isn’t only still alive, but that his eyes are blue and glowing now. What does this mean? In the comics Mulligan became the host for the symbiote known as Toxin, which is an offspring of Carnage’s. It’s a little unclear what happened in Venom 2, but it seems possible that Shriek and Carnage’s offspring was implanted in Mulligan by Shriek before her (apparent) demise under that church bell that came ringing for her.

The bottom line: Toxin seems a sure bet to show up in Venom 3, with Mulligan as its host. But will Spider-Man also appear in the film? The Sony Marvel slate of characters also includes Jared Leto’s Morbius, coming in early 2022, and there are several other films in development as well. Maybe Toxin will wind up being just one super-being in Venom 3. Either way, Venom is about to find himself in a whole new world of possibilities.

What did you think of the Venom 2 post credits scene and ending? Let’s discuss in the comments! And for more on the film, here's how to watch Venom 2. And get the scoop on Venom's release date dilemma while you're at it.

By now we’re used to iPhones getting major updates on a biannual basis. One year the smartphone gets a major design overhaul, while the following year is a refinement with a new processor, better cameras, and generally small changes. This year’s iPhone 13 Pro has completely broken that mold with both technical improvements and design refinements, including a 120Hz display with a smaller notch, completely revamped cameras, bigger batteries, and so much more.

For something that’s updated annually, the iPhone 13 Pro feels like an almost completely new device. This is easily the most exciting iPhone in a long time, even compared to last year’s splashy redesign.

iPhone 13 Pro – Design and Features

The iPhone 13 Pro might use the same overall chassis as the iPhone 12 Pro, but this new handset is noticeably heavier as soon as you pick it up. On paper, Apple’s flagship has gone from weighing 189g to 204g, largely due to bigger batteries and camera lenses.

Speaking of those larger camera lenses, they’re almost the size of dimes now, which by extension calls for a larger camera bump. The sensor array is 2mm thick, which prevents the iPhone 13 from lying flat on a table. This massively bumped-up camera bump also makes it incompatible with some phone controllers including the Backbone One. So you might be out of luck if you were hoping to use an older case or other iPhone peripherals here.

The display brings the most welcome iPhone 13 Pro changes. First up, the screen notch is 20% smaller than the previous iPhone, which has until now been unchanged since the iPhone X originally introduced the notch. The new notch is narrower on the sides but dips down a skosh more. The extra bit of screen real estate is fantastic for watching full screen videos and playing games. You also get a larger clock and notification icons to boot.

The other most significant improvement to the iPhone 13 Pro is its 6.1-inch screen finally refreshes at 120Hz with ProMotion. Plenty of Android phones – and a few iPads – have featured 120Hz screens for the last few years already, and finally getting smoother scrolling on Apple’s handset is fantastic. 120Hz makes scrolling feel extra silky, and swiping between your widgets, apps, and app library so much more responsive.

Unfortunately, beyond swiping around on your screen, there aren’t many ways to take advantage of that 120Hz right now. As of this writing, there’s a bug (Apple is working on a fix) that prevents the phone’s Core Animation technology from utilizing the maximum refresh rate. There also aren’t any apps that support the 120Hz refresh rate, but I’m hoping developers begin rolling it out soon. Fast-paced games like The Pathless and Asphalt 8+ already run like butter on the iPhone 13 Pro thanks to its A15 Bionic processor, and extremely smooth frame rate would only make that experience even better.

iPhone 13 Pro – Gaming and Performance

The iPhone 13 Pro’s new A15 Bionic processor has an additional GPU core compared to last year’s A14 Bionic chip, a significant upgrade. This spec bump mostly plays into powering the handset’s new 120Hz ProMotion display, but it also makes the phone more graphically capable for editing complex cinematic mode video and the serious slate of Apple Arcade games releasing now.

The iPhone 13 Pro masterfully runs graphically challenging games like Monster Hunter Stories+ and Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls without the slightest bit of stutter. It’s a step away from the purely original mobile titles that Apple Arcade was originally known for, but it’s amazing to see console and handheld games run extremely smoothly on the iPhone now.

Apple has increased the maximum storage capacity up to 1TB, which might seem absolutely obscene, but makes sense considering how good this phone is for shooting video. Another thing to note about the storage capacity is the base 128GB iPhone 13 Pro can only shoot 1080p ProRes video. To shoot in 4K, you need at least the 256GB model.

One other spec upgrade is expanded support for Mid-Band 5G, which means you can take advantage of more 5G networks around the world. It’s a small improvement, but after swapping over to the new iPhone, I found myself connecting to T-Mobile's mid-band 5G UC network in places where previously I would typically only get 4G or the carrier’s low-band 5G connection.

iPhone 13 Pro – Camera

The cameras have easily seen the biggest overhaul on the iPhone 13 Pro. The main wide-angle camera’s new 12MP sensor is physically bigger, and features larger 1.9 µm pixels, plus sensor-shift technology. This improved main camera first debuted on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, and this year it has trickled down to the smaller iPhone Pro.

Meanwhile, the 12MP ultrawide camera features a larger aperture and a new macro shooting, and then the 12MP telephoto camera has been upgraded with 3x optical zoom giving it the equivalent focal length of a 77mm camera lens.

Not only is the main camera’s sensor larger in both size and imaging pixels, but it also has a wider open f1.5 aperture lens that makes it excel at nighttime shooting. The iPhone 13 Pro’s new main sensor captures a wider dynamic range and blacks that are actually black rather than a hazy gray.

The Ultrawide camera also features a larger f1.8 aperture that helps in low-light situations, though not to the same extent as the main camera. It can also now focus super close, up to 2cm away, to take macro photography shots. Thankfully Apple chose to add this feature to one of the phone’s preexisting three cameras rather than add a disappointingly low-resolution macro camera like so many Android phones have. Interestingly, you don’t even need to manually switch to the ultrawide camera to take macro images, instead, the handset automatically switches to it as soon as you try to focus on a subject within 10cm.

Lastly, the new 3x telephoto camera adds some very welcome added reach to the iPhone 13 Pro’s photographic arsenal. The extra magnification helps you shoot tighter portrait photos, and of course, shoot farther away objects. Unfortunately, the added zoom also closes the aperture of this lens from f2.2 to f2.8, so less light passes through its optics. However, to make up for it Apple has added night mode shooting on the telephoto camera, and the lens features optical image stabilization to help steady those long exposures.

iPhone 13 Pro – Cinematic Mode

Cinematic mode is the only new video feature on the iPhone 13. It essentially lets you take the blurred portrait effect we’ve enjoyed on stills and apply it to your videos. This mode artificially creates a narrow depth of field to blur the background around whatever you’re shooting. When applied to video, this also allows you to shift or rack focus between subjects as well.

In practice, Cinematic Mode is pretty neat for giving your movies more depth and isolating your subject. However, to make it work you need to set up the right shots and be prepared to edit your videos after the fact.

First off, to create an effective Cinematic Mode video, your subjects need to be spaced pretty far from each other and ideally not all standing next to each other in a line. The second finicky thing about Cinematic Mode is it works a little too hard to find things to focus on and switches between them automatically. So in a crowded space with multiple people and faces, the phone will sometimes lock focus onto another subject without asking you. Additionally, the way the iPhone finds focus isn’t perfect, so you’ll sometimes see it struggling to find focus around your subject, which causes the blur effect to wobble in a very unnatural way.

Because of all this, you’ll almost always need to edit your video afterward to ensure the focus is locked onto only the subjects you wanted. But even that process is painstaking as the iPhone easily loses focus lock on people – especially if they’re moving around a lot or other objects are moving around them – meaning you might need to relock focus on them multiple times.

Even after you put all that effort into making Cinematic Mode work as you wanted, the blur effect is very apparently fake. A traditional camera lens creates a natural-looking blur effect from shallow depth of field in which only objects at a certain distance are in clear focus while anything closer or past that point is obscured.

Apple’s blurring effect, on the other hand, basically adds an uneven blur around the subjects you lock focus to in a very inconsistent manner. This artificial blur looks rough with jagged, aliased edges if you examine your Cinematic Modes video closely.

Another limitation of Cinematic Mode is it lowers the shooting resolution of your videos to 1080p.

As frustrating as Cinematic Mode is to work with, there’s still something impressive (or dystopian) about watching the iPhone’s neural engine at work finding faces like it’s your own personal facial recognition surveillance camera. Still, I can’t imagine shooting many movies in cinematic mode with how much you need to wrestle with the focusing system while you’re shooting and editing afterward.

iPhone 13 Pro – Battery Life

Last year’s iPhones cut battery sizes, and thankfully they’ve been increased this time around. Whereas the iPhone 12 Pro was only 2,815mAh in capacity, the iPhone 13 Pro has bumped up to a 3,095mAh battery. According to Apple, this new flagship should last 1.5 hours longer than the iPhone 12 Pro.

For me, this translated into a phone that would still have slightly more than 60% of its battery life – rather than below 50% – at the end of a normal day consisting of checking email, browsing the web, scrolling through social media, listening to podcasts and music, watching YouTube videos, and taking photos. With heavier usage – consisting of playing Apple Arcade games on top of a lot more of the usage I mentioned above – I ended days with closer to 25% battery life.

Basically, you can expect this phone to last you through a full day even if you’re using it almost constantly.

The iPhone 12 Pro brought back the convenience of MagSafe with magnetized wireless charging and the iPhone 13 Pro boosts its performance. While iPhone 12 Pro could only juice up to 22% after 30 minutes of Magsafe charging, the new iPhone soaks up a 31% charge – and then a 57% charge after a full hour. That’s almost a single percentage of charge per minute.

Of course, wired charging is still the most efficient way to recharge the iPhone 13 Pro. In my testing, the battery charged to 56% after 30 minutes and 86% after an hour.

Purchasing Guide

The iPhone 13 Pro is available at a starting price of $999 and you can find it at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and direct from Apple.

Woody Harrelson says likability can lead to a more interesting villain as he compares his villainous turn as Cletus Kasady in Venom 2 to Mickey Knox in Natural Born Killers.

In an interview with IGN, Harrelson says humanizing villains with a companion can attract audiences to his psychopathic characters. It worked with Julliette Lewis' character in Natural Born Killers and again with Naomie Harris' character in Venom 2.

"[Companionship] is one of those aspects of the story that endears you to Cletus Kasady in spite of being a serial killer, which is good because you want to have some likable things," Harrelson said. "That's what makes for a more interesting villain."

Harrelson also discussed how to humanize serial killer characters like Cletus Kasady and Mickey Knox when an actor is in the role. He says using a character's childhood trauma can help storytellers civilize even the most truly villainous characters.

"I do feel like there's all of these incidents from one's childhood that create that level of derangement," Harrelson said. "So, I guess I try to put my imagination into that."

Find out where to watch Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The Marvel Comics movie sequel racked up $11.6 million in Thursday previews in the United States and Canada, which is the second-best of all movies domestically since April 2020 following Black Widow's $13.2 million, according to Variety.

In our Venom: Let There Be Carnage review, we said the sequel, "improves on everything from the first movie, leaning into its own absurdity. While it plays it a little safe, it still points the series in an exciting direction."

IGN also has full breakdowns of the movie's new characters Carnage and Shriek.

Petey Oneto is a freelance writer for IGN.

Dungeon Encounters is directed by Hiroyuki Ito, involved in the creation of titles including Final Fantasy IV, V, XII, and Tactics. I started sweating a little bit as I began playing because not only is he well known for his work designing battle systems, but I was told that it was first and foremost about its systems, so naturally, I prepared myself to have to take a lot on board. Some of you may also be interested to know that Cattle Call, known for the Metal Max series and The Legend of Legacy, handled its development.

Not a game with lush visuals and effects or a deep, engrossing story, but a turn-based, numbers-focused, bare-bones RPG of sorts. IGN Japan had the opportunity to try it out before release, so here are our initial impressions.

This dungeon crawler RPG involves forming a party of up to four characters and delving into the depths of a board-game-style square grid map. Though the dungeon is divided into squares, you're able to focus on exploring and fighting your way across maps without having to worry about systems like stamina or hunger. As you progress down floors, the maps get bigger and the enemies get tougher.

Stepping on one of the numbered squares found along a map triggers either a battle or an event. Think of these numbers as replacements for enemy symbols or treasure chests, with black numbers representing battles and white numbers leading to events. Almost like a sinister version of snakes and ladders.

The game's simple battle system features bars that fill according to each allied and enemy character's speed. Once a bar is full, that character becomes able to act. Some of you may know this as an active battle system, a part of Final Fantasy beginning with FFIV. Though attribute-based weaknesses and resource management for powerful offensive or healing techniques and spells are commonly found in RPG battle systems, this game uses neither attributes nor MP and not even items! What you will find, though, are simple yet deep slugfests.

What makes the battles in this game stand out are the three values that both enemies and allies have: physical defense (a shield that absorbs physical damage), magical defense (a shield that absorbs magical damage), and HP (which of course means defeat for allies or enemies if it reaches zero).

Physical and magical defense stats are relatively popular in RPGs, but in Dungeon Encounters they act as shields that take damage in place of HP. In other words, taking physical damage from swords and bows will first reduce your physical defense, and your HP only begins taking damage once that defense reaches 0. The same applies for magical damage, so you'll have to first whittle away an enemy's magical defense if you want to defeat them with magical damage. What's more, excess damage in most cases doesn't carry over. Even if an enemy is down to 1 physical defense and 1 HP, you'll need to attack twice to defeat them even with a 200-damage physical attack.

Each character only has two types of attacks at most, further complicating your decisions in battle. Physical and magical attacks have different levels of effectiveness against different enemies, requiring you to give some consideration to how your party's attacks are balanced. Also, while MP may not exist in this game, multi-target attacks and tricky-to-use random damage attacks force you to make each simple choice with great care.

During my time playing, I seemed to get reasonably good results with a party of characters who each had one physical attack and one magical attack, but it felt like a pretty basic strategy that anyone would come up with, and one I doubt would keep being as effective as you progress through the game. Making you think and switching things up is the fact that not all enemies can be approached in the same way: flying enemies can only be damaged with ranged physical attacks like bows and guns or with magical attacks, enemies with petrifying attacks can completely disable your party members. As a result I began to get the feeling that the variety of nasty and fierce enemy attacks would only grow. One attack in particular fully drained the action gauge of all its targets, trapping me in a loop when its user appeared alongside other enemies. You'll definitely need to pay close attention to the order in which you take down your foes to avoid sticky situations.

Another important point to note is that while your physical and magical defensive shields are reset after each battle, your HP stays the same. Not only that, but very few ways exist to restore your HP, making it important to efficiently navigate each battle while taking as little damage as possible.

Just as crucial to Dungeon Encounters as its battles is its exploration. As noted earlier, players progress down maps of squares, some of which contain numbers. Though black numbers represent enemy encounters, white numbers trigger events that benefit the player. These can be a vast number of things: shops where you can buy and sell equipment; chances to recover HP, status ailments, defeated allies and more; information on specific enemies; treasure that provides new items; new learnable abilities; and puzzles to solve.

Abilities are a vital part of this game, ranging from HP recovery and defense against specific status ailments to those that help in exploration like an expanded map display. Using these requires Ability Points, but these are gained as you travel across the map, organically encouraging exploration.

Puzzles may show the coordinates of an item after a string of questions are answered, while others ask you to deduce the location of a hidden item based on the shape of a map, adding some extra excitement to what could otherwise risk turning into dull exploration.

I only had an opportunity to play the beginning of this game, the first 19 of 99 floors to be exact. Even so, I found myself in situations where one wrong choice in battle or one crippling status ailment put my entire party at danger of falling. Because this game uses an auto-save feature, you'll even start to sweat when you fail to flee multiple times in a row. It was hard to tell from my experience just how far the game's battles could go in terms of challenging the player without feeling unfair, but I did leave with the feeling of wanting to beat the game and see all of what Dungeon Encounters has to offer.

With its heavy design focus on systems and numbers in particular rather than rich worldbuilding and visuals, Dungeon Encounters is perhaps not the type of game that will find a wide audience. But if you are the type of player drawn to battling it out in simple yet deep ways, you should definitely give this one a try.

Dungeon Encounters is scheduled to launch on PS4 and Switch on October 14, 2021, and on PC (Steam) on October 15.

Yoshiki Chiba is an editor at IGN Japan.

Mayday is in theaters and on VOD on Oct. 1, 2021.

Avant-garde cinema isn’t meant to please the masses, but to truly have an impact, we still need to feel something for what’s been presented — and that’s why Karen Cinorre’s Mayday is incredibly frustrating. The director certainly assembles an array of beguiling elements, from her talented cast to the beautiful out-of-time setting, yet none of it stitches together to say what you hope it might all be about.

Opening with an ethereal disembodied female voice reciting the internationally recognized distress signal word of Mayday, Cinorre makes us work to suss out the time, place, and context of Anastasia’s (Grace Van Patten) existence. She’s a mousy waitress working for a catering venue. She likes two of her male colleagues, but she’s treated miserably by her manager and seems rather disconnected to much of the world around her.

During prep for a wedding reception where a storm is raging outside, something happens to Anastasia that transports her into a liminal space where she washes up on an unnamed island, and three young women welcome her into their fold. Marsha (Mia Goth), Bea (Havana Rose Liu), and Gert (Soko) live in an abandoned WWI era submarine and imply that dire consequences in their previous lives brought them to this space where they now practice a variety of signaling techniques to lure soldiers to their small rock and then dispatch of them in cold and cruel ways.

Existing in this feral purgatory, Marsha especially demands that they all find their individual talent so they can eke out vengeance against the subjugators of their gender. Anastasia — renamed Ana by Marsha — is entirely confused and more than reticent about participating in this endless state of innocence lost, even when she eventually warms to the freedoms of their independent lives.

Ana assumes the quartet are all dead, which is implied but never entirely supported by dialogue or circumstances, since it becomes apparent they can be hurt by the men who aren’t dispatched quickly with bullets, stranglings, or drownings. Through dreams of her old life and mumbled conversations with Bea and Gert, Ana pieces together that she doesn’t really belong in this place of cyclical violence, which keeps her as suspended from progress as her inert, old life was.

Despite some beautifully shot locations and intriguing period costuming and set design for the women and their soldier prey to exist within, Mayday feels like it’s trying to say something about how the world has allowed the male gaze to dominate the stories of loss and sacrifice in life and war, making women a footnote to those experiences, but the four women don’t do anything to change that narrative. They don’t make the men they encounter, through force or violence or even conversation, see them as fully formed people. Marsha just inflicts death with determination and quirkiness, and requires the same of her cohorts. At one point a character says, “I don’t think we’re seeing the whole picture,” which sums up the failure of Cinorre’s intentions. Does she want for these women redemption, autonomy, to move forward after their pain? Who knows? The characters exist only as reflections of their pain, so there are no stakes, or even a sense of intentional purpose for any of them.

Because the film presents so little context and is devoid of scenes meant to really connect to who these women are outside of their murky traumas, it’s hard to muster the energy in the last act to care no matter how much the swelling score and the editing tell us we should. Mayday is undoubtedly handsome to look at, with a collection of interesting locations and sound design that all have the potential to engage. But in the end, it’s like watching a gauzy dream about nothing.