Venom: The Last Dance has bombed at the box office. Photo / IMDB
Venom: The Last Dance has bombed at the box office. Photo / IMDB
Finishing below opening-weekend expectations, the new Venom flick shows that there’s still little bite in the US for Sony’s Marvel movies.
Venom: The Last Dance appears to have airballed.
The new Venom film, the third movie in a trilogy about Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his cheeky alien symbiote darker half, earned US$51 million at US box offices after its Friday release, making it the No 1 earner for its opening weekend but falling short of its predecessors and joining other poor-performing comic book flicks of recent years.
The lacklustre showing at the box office is yet another example of how Sony’s Marvel movies have struggled to entice moviegoers and adds to evidence that predicting the earnings of a comic book movie has become more difficult.
Though it still might rebound with a solid showing from the global box office, Last Dance is trailing domestically behind the two other films in its trilogy.
The first Venom, released in 2018, rounded up US$80.2m ($134.2m) in its opening weekend in the United States. The sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, released in 2021 as moviegoers returned to the cinema amid the pandemic, earned in its US$90m domestic opening. Last Dance was expected to finish around US$65m but fell well short of that number.
The low take for Last Dance comes as a bit of a surprise, given that the character of Venom is so widely popular. Originally a villain to Spider-Man, the alien symbiote has taken on his own life as an anti-hero who appears in major comic-book crossover events, as well as on real-world coffee mugs, T-shirts and collectible popcorn buckets.
The Venom-centric movies are, as The Post’s own reviewers have said, “dumb fun” – enough for them to earn well over US$1 billion combined.
But they are a part of the Sony-Marvel collection of films (often called the “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe”), which are different from the films in the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and have struggled to turn heads at the box office.
Sony’s projects centre on Spider-Man and the villains and heroes close to him (Sony reportedly has the rights to hundreds of those characters). The web-slinger himself (currently played by Tom Holland) appears in the MCU, though, because of an agreement made between Sony and Marvel.
These Spider-Man adjacent characters haven’t exactly gelled with audiences. Madame Web, a film known more for a popular line from its trailer than for the telepathic heroine herself, flopped with a US$15.3 million US opening in February, according to data from Box Office Mojo. That’s much lower than 2022′s Morbius, a film about a vampiric villain turned hero that earned US$39m in its opening weekend. (That film was so poorly received that a wave of trolling memes inspired Sony into rereleasing the film, only for it to flop again.)
Still, Sony has found success with animated films Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), which grossed more than US$570m combined at the domestic box office throughout their entire runs.
Tom Hardy attends the UK premiere of Venom: The Last Dance at the BFI IMAX Waterloo on October 23 this year in London, England. Photo / WireImage
Sony will have another crack at this with Kraven the Hunter, a project about another Spider-Man adversary slated for release in December, despite multiple delays.
Last Dance’s numbers revive a box-office narrative that audiences are tired of movies based on comics – briefly abated this summer with Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine, which made more than US$1.3b (after a US$211.4m opening weekend in the United States) and surpassed the original Joker as the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history.
But Joker’s own sequel from DC Studios and Warner Bros, Joker: Folie à Deux, bombed with a US$37.6m domestic opening earlier in October. Not to mention there were reports of people leaving the movie early when (surprise!) it turned out to be a musical.
Similarly, The Marvels, following its 2019 MCU billion-dollar-earning predecessor Captain Marvel, underwhelmed in November 2023 with a US$46.1m opening.
All of this uncertainty for the comic book movie genre will come to a head next year when Marvel unleashes a three-pack of films (Captain America: Brave New World, Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts*), and DC Comics launches its new cinematic universe under the tutelage of James Gunn, whose new film Superman is expected to premiere next summer.
