While a $400 million international box office wouldn’t be something for a big budget superhero movie to shout about a couple of years ago, Venom: Let There Be Carnage passed that milestone on Tuesday, making it only the fifth movie to do so since the beginning of the Covid pandemic. The Andy Serkis directed sequel falls massively short of the $800 million plus haul of 2018’s Venom, but in pandemic terms this has been a huge triumph, and in no small part has been helped along by the current hype around Marvel Studio’s collaborative effort with Sony on Spider-Man: No Way Home and the crossover potential that has been rife for a long while.
Tom Hardy’s second outing as the Marvel anti-hero opened domestically on October 1st with a $90 million debut weekend, and has gone from strength to strength since. With Marvel and Sony seeming to be about to launch a combined universe in some capacity, interest in everything related to Spider-Man is reaping the benefits, even when they were doing fine in their own right without the additional help.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage hasn’t just been a hit on one front, as the movie is fast approaching the $200 million mark domestically, and has had huge debuts in Russia, Latin America, Spain, Italy and Korea, as well as having set additional local records in Mexico, Brazil, Ukraine, Argentina and Ecuador. While there is still no word on when the movie will get a China release, which would obviously give another boost to the box office results, Australia and Japan will see the movie open on November 25th and January 3rd respectively. In short, Venom is set to cause more carnage for a while yet.
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“For us, Venom: Let There Be Carnage absolutely validates our exclusive theatrical window strategy,” said Sony President, Motion Pictures Group Josh Greenstein. “If you look at the history of theatrical, the obituaries have been written many times, and they’ve always been wrong. We had confidence in the theatrical experience, confidence in our big valuable IP, and took full advantage and had the patience to weather all of this. That strategy is paying off, which we’re happy about. It’s a nice validation of the theatrical strategy.”
Venom: Let There Be Carnage has become the second highest October release ever domestically, sitting behind Joker, which was released before the pandemic, making the achievement even more impressive.
“Venom: Let There be Carnage is a box office sensation. This film really resonated with our moviegoers, delivering results that significantly outpace the industry performance, and set multiple all-time Cinemark records, including the largest-ever October box office weekend,” said Cinemark CEO Mark Zoradi in a statement. “This is another strong example that people want and need to get out of their homes for an immersive entertainment experience. Congratulations to our partners at Sony and all the talent involved on delivering such a fantastic film for our moviegoers to see exclusively in a movie theatre.”
While it is clear that worries over the cinematic experience struggling to recover from the pandemic have been wildly exaggerated over the last six months, the huge boom in streaming options and the money involved in many projects being made exclusively for services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ mean that both forms of release are clearly here to stay. This news comes to us from Deadline.
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