Ralph Fiennes in a scene from Conclave.Courtesy of Focus Features. © 2024 All Rights Reserved./The Associated Press
Venom: The Last Dance showed less bite than expected at the box office, collecting $51 million in its opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, significantly down from the alien symbiote franchise’s previous entries.
Projections for the third Venom film from Sony Pictures had been closer to $65 million. More concerning, though, was the drop off from the first two Venom films. The 2018 original debuted with $80.2 million, while the 2021 follow-up, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, opened with $90 million even as theaters were still in recovery mode during the pandemic.
The Last Dance, starring Tom Hardy as a journalist who shares his body with an alien entity also voiced by Hardy, could still turn a profit for Sony. Its production budget, not accounting for promotion and marketing, was about $120 million — significantly less than most comic-book films.
But The Last Dance is also performing better overseas. Internationally, Venom: The Last Dance collected $124 million over the weekend, including $46 million over five days of release in China. That’s good enough for one of the best international weekends of the year for a Hollywood release.
Still, neither reviews (36 per cent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) nor audience scores (a franchise-low “B-” CinemaScore) have been good for the film scripted by Kelly Marcel and Hardy, and directed by Marcel.
The low weekend for Venom: The Last Dance also likely insures that superhero films will see their lowest-grossing year in a dozen years, not counting the pandemic year of 2020, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter for Franchise Entertainment.
Following on the heels of the Joker: Folie à Deux flop, Gross estimates that 2024 superhero films will gross about $2.25 billion worldwide. The only coming entry is Marvel’s Kraven the Hunter, due out Dec. 13. Even with the $1.3 billion of Deadpool & Wolverine, the genre hasn’t, overall, been dominating the way it once did. In 2018, for example, superhero films accounted for more than $7 billion in global ticket sales.
Last week’s top film, the Paramount Pictures horror sequel Smile 2, dropped to second place with $9.4 million. That brings its two-week total to $83.7 million worldwide.
The weekend’s biggest success story might have been Conclave, the papal thriller starring Ralph Fiennes and directed by Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front). The Focus Features release, a major Oscar contender, launched with $6.5 million in 1,753 theaters.
That put Conclave into third place, making it the rare adult-oriented drama to make a mark theatrically. Some 77 per cent of ticket buyers were over the age of 35, Focus said. With a strong opening and stellar reviews, Conclave could continue to gather momentum both with moviegoers and Oscar voters.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
1. Venom: The Last Dance, $51 million.
2. Smile 2, $9.4 million.
3. Conclave, $6.5 million.
4. The Wild Robot, $6.5 million.
5. We Live in Time, $4.8 million.
6. Terrifier 3, $4.3 million.
7, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, $3.2 million.
8. Anora, $867,142.
9. Piece by Piece, $720,000.
10. Transformers One, $720,000.
