If there’s one prevailing lesson Hollywood should take from the 2024 box office, it’s that song and dance-adjacent superhero spinoffs aren’t working. Joker: Folie À Deux flopped spectacularly for Warner Bros. (it’s already out of the top 10 this week) and now Venom: The Last Dance is taking a similar swan dive for Sony.
The Tom Hardy-led threequel may have opened at the top of the box office this weekend, but Sony executives probably aren’t doing a happy dance over its $51 million haul. The Last Dance clocked the lowest opening weekend of any of the Venom films, with the original 2018 outing bringing in $80 million and 2021 sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage bringing in $90 million. Still, it’s not all doom and gloom for the symbiote on his last ride. He seemed to find a bit more purchase overseas, with the film adding an additional $124 million to its total internationally. With an approximately $120 million budget, according to Deadline, this one is bound to turn a profit eventually—even if it’s not as high as its hosts may have hoped.
It was a pretty light movie-going weekend otherwise. A rare three films made it into the top 10 with mere six-figure returns: Anora, Piece By Piece, and Transformers One. That’s still great news for the Mikey Madison-led sex worker Cinderella story, which made $867,142 from only 34 theaters. The news is not nearly as good for Piece By Piece and Transformers One, which fell by 64.8% and 63.8%, respectively, from last weekend. Perhaps people were too distracted by their film-themed Halloween costumes to actually go see one; we’ll see if the numbers pick back up next weekend.
The full top 10, courtesy of Box Office Mojo, is below:
- Venom: The Last Dance, $51,000,000
- Smile 2, $9,400,000
- The Wild Robot, $6,500,000
- Conclave, $6,500,000
- We Live In Time, $4,848,132
- Terrifier 3, $4,770,505
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, $3,231,000
- Anora, $867,142
- Piece By Piece, $721,000
- Transformers One, $720,000