Venom: The Last Dance has hit a record low for the franchise in its opening weekend. The Venom: The Last Dance release is set to close out the trilogy, which stars Tom Hardy as both Eddie Brock and the titular alien symbiote. It comes three years after 2021’s Let There Be Carnage, which in turn came out three years after the original movie’s premiere in 2018, kicking off Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, a franchise that is loosely linked to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and tells the stories of villains and antiheroes from the original Spider-Man Comics without featuring the hero himself.
Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, Venom: The Last Dance is projected to take No. 1 at the domestic box office with a projected 3-day total of $52 million in its opening weekend. Although it is topping the chart for the weekend, this marks a record low for the Tom Hardy franchise, as the first installment opened to $80.2 million in 2018 and Let There Be Carnage debuted with an even better $90 million in spite of a pandemic-depressed 2021 box office. This new installment will fall short of both of those movies by tens of millions of dollars.
What This Opening Weekend Means For Venom: The Last Dance
It Could Still Turn A Profit
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While this opening weekend total sees the movie taking a major tumble from the financial highs of the original two installments, the Venom: The Last Dance box office is still in a reasonably safe place. It is currently projected to have a worldwide opening weekend of $180 million or more, which will set it on track to turn a profit. Because it cost $120 million, only slightly more than Let There Be Carnage’s $110 million, there is still room for it to do reasonably well as its break-even point is likely somewhere around $300 million.
Typically, a movie needs to earn back two and a half times its budget in order to break even.
If it continues its current pace relative to the second movie’s overall worldwide total of $506.8 million, the new movie could very well surpass that break-even point and then some. However, it will be a more neck-and-neck race than in the past, potentially because Venom: The Last Dance reviews have been grim, earning the movie a 36% Rotten Tomatoes score. However, it is still looking much better than the non-Venom Sony Spider-Man movies Morbius (15%) and Madame Web (11%), which opened to $39 million and $15.3 million respectively.
Our Take On The Weekend Box Office
Venom 3 Could Hang Onto No. 1 For Another Weekend
While Venom: The Last Dance is suffering compared to the previous installments, it is still behaving something like a comic book movie, performing much better than October’s splashy DC flop Joker: Folie à Deux, which cost $200 million, opened to $37.7 million, and had a staggering, record-breaking 81.4% drop in its second weekend. This gives the Tom Hardy movie another shot at holding the No. 1 spot in its second weekend, as the only major title being released then is the Robert Zemeckis drama Here, which is getting a relatively quiet rollout.
Source: Deadline
