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No bite, no fight

NEW YORK (AP) – Venom: The Last Dance showed less bite than expected at the box office, collecting USD51 million in its opening weekend, according to studio estimates on Sunday, significantly down from the alien symbiote franchise’s previous entries.

Projections for the third Venom film from Sony Pictures had been closer to USD65 million.

More concerning, though, was the drop off from the first two Venom films. The 2018 original debuted with USD80.2 million, while the 2021 follow-up, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, opened with USD90 million even as theatres 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 USD120 million – significantly less than most comic-book films.

But The Last Dance is also performing better overseas. Internationally, Venom: The Last Dance collected USD124 million over the weekend, including USD46 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 film consultant who publishes a newsletter for Franchise Entertainment David A Gross.

Following on the heels of the Joker: Folie à Deux flop, Gross estimates that 2024 superhero films will gross about USD2.25 billion worldwide. The only upcoming entry is Marvel’s Kraven the Hunter, due out December 13. Even with the USD1.3 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 USD7 billion in global ticket sales.

Last week’s top film, the Paramount Pictures horror sequel Smile 2, dropped to second place with USD9.4 million. That brings its two-week total to USD83.7 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 USD6.5 million in 1,753 theatres. – Jake Coyle

Tom Hardy in a scene from ‘Venom: The Last Dance’. PHOTO: AP
Ralph Fiennes in a scene from ‘Conclave’. PHOTO: AP

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