Yes, Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage just nabbed the biggest opening weekend of the so-called “pandemic era.”
Sony and Marvel’s Venom sequel ( review) caused plenty of carnage at the domestic box office this weekend, earning a remarkable $90.1 million in its debut Fri-Sun frame. That’s a halfway decent (especially for a heavily-anticipated but not quite critically acclaimed comic book superhero sequel) 2.42x multiplier. Moreover, it’s the second-biggest October launch of all time, behind only Joker ($96 million on this same weekend in 2019). It’s 12.5% larger than the $80 million debut (on the same frame, natch, in 2018) of the previous Venom. Moreover, the Andy Serkis-directed and Kelly Marcel-penned horror/fantasy/romcom/superhero flick earned the biggest Fri-Sun debut since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker ($173 million) in December 2019. Yes, Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage just nabbed the biggest opening weekend of the so-called “pandemic era.” This opening, which Cinemark is reporting as their biggest Covid-era debut and their biggest-ever October opening, “proves” a few things. First, despite a resurgence of the “superhero fatigue” narrative in the aftermath of Black Widow ’s “mere” $80 million domestic debut and The Suicide Squad ’s catastrophic $26.5 million launch this past summer, audiences will still flock to the Marvel/DC flicks they actually want to see. Second, the relative theatrical failures of Space Jam: A New Legacy, Snake Eyes, The Suicide Squad and (arguably/possibly) Jungle Cruise are about variables associated with those would-be franchise flicks. This “bigger than the first Venom ” debut shows what I’ve frankly been saying since May. The surefire blockbusters, think A Quiet Place part II, F9, Shang-Chi and now Venom 2 grossed in North America what they would have (or pretty close to it) pre-Covid. Credit where credit is due, Sony was right to bet on a solo Venom movie. As noted yesterday, audiences liked Venom more than critics, pushing the Tom Hardy/Michelle Williams origin story to $213.5 million domestic and (thanks to a bonkers-huge $269 million in China) $854 million worldwide on a $90 million budget. But even those of us who didn’t entirely endorse the film tipped our hat to Hardy’s bonkers performance and the film’s flirtations with outright camp and metaphorical queer romance amid an otherwise conventional superhero origin story plot.
