‘Venom 3’ Tries to Make Box Office Lightning Strike One More Time

Six years ago, Sony found a new Marvel box office hit with “Venom,” starring Tom Hardy as the Spider-Man nemesis-turned-dark-antihero who won over audiences with a level of camp that caught everyone off guard.

Now, after a successful 2021 sequel, theaters are getting the trilogy capper “Venom: The Last Dance,” which will try to follow in the steps of its predecessors and win over fans despite leaving critics unimpressed with a 40% Rotten Tomatoes score. And it’s showing once again how the franchise is the most successful IP in Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff universe, which has otherwise struggled theatrically.

At a time when many tentpole films, including the recent flop “Joker: Folie a Deux,” have seen their budgets inch higher and higher, Sony and Columbia Pictures have kept “Venom 3” to a relatively low $120 million before marketing costs. That’s a good thing, as the film is currently projected for an opening weekend of $65 million, lower than the $80 million opening of the first “Venom” and the $90 million start of its sequel, “Let There Be Carnage.” Sony’s global projections are set at $150 million.

“Let There Be Carnage” came out three years ago at a time when theaters were fighting to get back on their feet after the pandemic, making its $213 million domestic and $506 million global total a rather impressive feat. The first “Venom” grossed a surprising $856 million worldwide, though much of that came from its $269 million run in China, a country whose audiences have since largely abandoned Hollywood imports.

Regardless of how it got there, “Venom” has been the standout success in Sony’s three-pronged Marvel strategy. Along with the Tom Holland “Spider-Man” films produced by Marvel Studios and the animated “Spider-Verse” trilogy, “Venom” is one of several attempts by Sony to make films based off of Spider-Man characters it holds the IP rights to.

While “Morbius” broke even theatrically and “Madame Web” flopped — both were panned by critics and audiences — “Venom” capitalized on the popularity of its main character at a time when interest in Marvel was still riding high amid the MCU’s Infinity Saga. Hardy’s darkly comedic take on the character sustained that interest, making “Let There Be Carnage” a promise of the big screen fun that audiences had missed while stuck in their homes.

“It’s ironic almost that Sony happened to put out ‘Venom’ first and thought that it could be replicated, but it’s not so simple,” Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock told TheWrap. “Venom is one of the best Spidey characters and most well-known, and the word-of-mouth has been so strong that we’ve seen really strong walkups for the first two films. I wouldn’t be surprised to see ‘The Last Dance’ do that again.”

To match the box office success of “Venom 2,” the third installment will have to do so without Carnage, the villain from the second film from which it takes its title. Played by Woody Harrelson, Carnage became Venom’s most famous adversary after he made the jump from villain to antihero in the Marvel comics and was a major part of the sequel’s drawing power among fans.

“The Last Dance” has new villains, the foremost being Knull, the creator of Venom and all the other symbiotes. But unlike “Carnage,” that’s not the main selling point in the marketing.

Instead, Sony has focused on the relationship between Venom and his human host, Eddie Brock, which fans have so deeply embraced with the shipping name “Symbrock” that Sony played into it with a romcom-tinged ad for the first “Venom” when it released on Blu-Ray. “Let There Be Carnage” then leaned more heavily into the campy yet sincere nature of Venom and Eddie’s relationship as they work through their differences.

The trailers for “The Last Dance” have teased that Eddie and Venom’s time together may be coming to an end. Whether that ends up being the case is the question that is the film’s main hook.

With films like “Joker 2,” “The Marvels,” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” among the comic book sequels that have fallen short at the box office, it’s clear that audiences will ditch a film from the once-bulletproof genre if the quality isn’t there. Conversely, hits like “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” each set themselves apart in the minds of audiences and showed they were more than just another superhero film.

Is the promise of more symbiote shenanigans, regardless of the actual plot, enough to satisfy the biggest “Venom” fans and build the post-release buzz needed to sustain the film in the weeks ahead? A $65 million opening, while lower than its predecessors, would be a good starting point for “Venom 3” to turn a theatrical profit. But it will be for naught if moviegoers who turned out for “Carnage” after a year in quarantine decide in large enough numbers that they’ve had their fill.

On the arthouse side, Focus Features is releasing its Oscar contender, “Conclave,” in 1,750 theaters. Directed by Edward Berger, in his follow-up to the Best International Feature winning adaptation of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the film stars Ralph Fiennes as the cardinal tasked by the Catholic Church to oversee the election of the next pope, only to discover a shocking conspiracy.

The film is currently projected for an opening weekend of $4-6 million and was produced by FilmNation on a $20 million budget. Focus acquired the film’s domestic rights last year. It premiered in September at TIFF.

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