It has been a while since a major movie was able to score a big box office victory despite negative reviews from critics, but Sony’s “Venom” did that with a $205 million global launch this past weekend, including $80 million domestically and without the help of China. On Monday, the film added another $9.6 million to its domestic total to push its four-day total to just under $90 million.
“I can’t say enough what an important win this was for Sony,” said Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “They need more successful franchises along with ‘Jumanji’ and they needed to prove that they could make a hit comic book movie without Marvel Studios, and they rolled the dice with Venom and it paid off with a record opening.”
With the studio’s smart decision to keep the production budget well below the average for a comic book movie — Sony is reporting $100 million — “Venom” should reap a solid profit with this start. But like pretty much every comic book movie these days, “Venom” isn’t sitting in a vacuum.
Instead, this tale about one of Spider-Man’s most popular foes is the first in what Sony hopes will be a series of spinoffs featuring characters from Spidey’s mythos. The spinoff series will continue two months from now with the animated film “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” with reported plans to develop future movies around characters like Silver Sable, Black Cat, and Morbius, the last of which is set to be played by Jared Leto.
So while Sony’s Spider-Verse is off to a swimming start, the coming weeks for “Venom” will provide hints at how big an audience Sony might have for future spinoffs.
The good news for “Venom” is that its opening weekend audience was very diverse. According to comScore’s PosTrak system, the ethnic breakdown for the opening weekend audience was 38 percent Caucasian, followed by 26 percent Hispanic, 18 percent African-American, and 11 percent Asian.
By comparison, the last major villain-centric comic book movie, “Suicide Squad,” had an opening weekend PosTrak breakdown of 52 percent Caucasian, with 22 percent Hispanic, 16 percent African-American and seven percent Asian. As we’ve seen with films like “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Black Panther,” a more diverse opening audience could help strengthen long-term box office performance, as that initial audience that fuels word of mouth is more widespread and can push turnout from more than one demographic.
That could come in handy this weekend, as the goal for “Venom” will be to avoid a large drop-off in its second weekend the way “Suicide Squad” did two years ago when it fell from a $133 million opening to a $43 million second weekend.
While the record opening may inflate the drop-off percentage for “Venom,” a second weekend total of $30 million or higher would be a good sign that interest is being carried over from hardcore to casual audiences. With “Halloween” likely to take over the 18-35 demographic when it comes out on Oct. 19, this coming weekend is “Venom”‘s one big shot to draw in general audiences.
Bock is optimistic about the film’s chances. “It’s been a while since we’ve had a movie do well despite bad reviews, but I think audiences were more ready for the film’s tone than critics were,” he said.
“Sony was smart to put this out at Halloween time when people are interested in seeing films about big, creepy monsters. ‘Venom’ also taps into that excitement of seeing antiheroes breaking the rules that made ‘Deadpool’ such a big hit.”
After this coming weekend, “Venom” will face stiff competition for its core demographic from Universal/Blumhouse’s “Halloween,” which will likely be the hottest film in theaters for the rest of the month. But this weekend, it will have younger audiences to themselves, and if the word of mouth can grow casual interest in the film, it could go a long way towards Sony establishing a base audience to build its Spidey-Verse off of.
But even if there’s a big drop, “Venom” could still find success overseas, with a China release still to come and if the film holds its status as the biggest American blockbuster currently in foreign theaters (until “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” come out in November).
Either way, “Venom” has now bonded with a big chunk of Marvel fans, and it’s not unreasonable for them to expect that the sequel, teased in the post-credits scene featuring Venom’s symbiote nemesis Carnage, will be in Sony’s future slate.
“This has been better than our wildest expectations. We were really confident that audiences were going to have a lot of fun with Venom and the great performance put by Tom Hardy,” said Sony’s president of domestic distribution Adrian Smith.
“Quite simply, our goal was to make a great superhero movie that provided something different for a large audience, and with an 89 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s safe to say our team succeeded.”