Box Office: Venom 3 Closes Out Tom Hardy Franchise With Record Low Opening Weekend [Full Chart Update]

Venom: The Last Dance has hit a record low for the franchise in its opening weekend. The Venom: The Last Dance release is set to close out the trilogy, which stars Tom Hardy as both Eddie Brock and the titular alien symbiote. It comes three years after 2021's Let There Be Carnage, which in turn came out three years after the original movie's premiere in 2018, kicking off Sony's Spider-Man Universe, a franchise that is loosely linked to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and tells the stories of villains and antiheroes from the original Spider-Man Comics without featuring the hero himself.

Per Deadline, as of Saturday morning, Venom: The Last Dance is projected to take No. 1 at the domestic box office with a projected 3-day total of $51 million in its opening weekend. Although it is topping the chart for the weekend, this marks a record low for the Tom Hardy franchise, as the first installment opened to $80.2 million in 2018 and Let There Be Carnage debuted with an even better $90 million in spite of a pandemic-depressed 2021 box office. This new installment will fall short of both of those movies by tens of millions of dollars.

In spite of its diminishing returns, Venom handily knocked Smile 2 from its position at No. 1. Smile 2 has fallen to No. 2 with $9.4 million, a 59% drop that is about par for a typical horror sequel, but this is a significant fall when compared to the smash hit 2022 original, which only fell 18% as word of mouth continued to spread. It is sandwiched between two new releases, as the buzzy Ralph Fiennes drama Conclave made a strong debut with $6.5 million, tying for No. 3. See the full domestic Top 5 chart for the weekend below:

It may take until Monday morning to learn whether Conclave or The Wild Robot have taken a slight edge to officially claim No. 3. Regardless, the DreamWorks animated movie has finally dropped from its long-held position at No. 2 after three straight weeks. Another holdout is the Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield romance We Live in Time, which maintained its position at No. 5 for the second week in a row as it earned $4.8 million and crossed the $10 million domestic milestone.

With the We Live in Time release holding firm, two Halloween season titles have fled the chart to make room for the new releases. This includes the Tim Burton legacy sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which fell from No. 4 to No. 7 with $3.23 million bringing its cumulative domestic total to a whopping $288.7 million. Joining it just outside the Top 5 is the slasher sequel Terrifier 3, which dropped from No. 3 to No. 6 with $4.5 million and a cumulative $44.3 million domestic, which is more than 20 times its scant $2 million budget.

What This Opening Weekend Means For Venom: The Last Dance

It Could Still Turn A Profit

While this opening weekend total sees the movie taking a major tumble from the financial highs of the original two installments, the Venom: The Last Dance box office is still in a reasonably safe place. It is currently projected to have a worldwide opening weekend of $180 million or more, which will set it on track to turn a profit. Because it cost $120 million, only slightly more than Let There Be Carnage's $110 million, there is still room for it to do reasonably well as its break-even point is likely somewhere around $300 million.

If it continues its current pace relative to the second movie's overall worldwide total of $506.8 million, the new movie could very well surpass that break-even point and then some. However, it will be a more neck-and-neck race than in the past, potentially because Venom: The Last Dance reviews have been grim, earning the movie a 36% Rotten Tomatoes score. However, it is still looking much better than the non-Venom Sony Spider-Man movies Morbius (15%) and Madame Web (11%), which opened to $39 million and $15.3 million respectively.

Our Take On The Weekend Box Office

Venom 3 Could Hang Onto No. 1 For Another Weekend

While Venom: The Last Dance is suffering compared to the previous installments, it is still behaving something like a comic book movie, performing much better than October's splashy DC flop Joker: Folie à Deux, which cost $200 million, opened to $37.7 million, and had a staggering, record-breaking 81.4% drop in its second weekend. This gives the Tom Hardy movie another shot at holding the No. 1 spot in its second weekend, as the only major title being released then is the Robert Zemeckis drama Here, which is getting a relatively quiet rollout.

Source: Deadline

Venom 3 is the third and final installment in Sony's symbiote trilogy starring Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock. It follows the events of Let There Be Carnage, where the anti-hero fought serial killer Cletus Kasady, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, where Brock was briefly transported to the MCU through the multiverse.

Director Kelly Marcel

Release Date October 25, 2024

Studio(s) Columbia Pictures , Marvel Entertainment , Pascal Pictures

Character(s) Eddie Brock / Venom , Mrs. Chen , Patrick Mulligan , Bartender

Runtime 110 Mins

Main Genre Adventure