Box office: Venom 3 opens soft, but not as soft as Joker 2 (and it cost less too)

Also: politically-charged church thriller Conclave had a reasonably solid opening, and awards hopeful Anora cracked the top ten despite playing in only 34 theatres.

Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and his alter ego in Venom: The Last Dance.

Out with the old struggling supervillain sequel, in with the new.¹

Joker: Folie à Deux fell out of the top ten this week, earning a mere estimated $600,000 and raising its cume to just $57.8 million after four weekends.

The original film, you may recall, opened to $96.2 million in 2019 and ended up grossing $335.5 million in North America and over a billion dollars worldwide. The sequel will probably have to settle for about a fifth of that globally, and less in North America.

Meanwhile, Venom: The Last Dance topped the chart this week with $51 million, which was well behind expectations and less than two thirds of the $80-90 million that the first two Venom movies opened to in 2018 and 2021, respectively.

There are some positive ways to spin this, though. The new Venom had the best first weekend of any film in the past seven weeks, and one of the top dozen openings of the year so far. It also had the 10th-best opening of any live-action film directed or co-directed by a woman, at least before taking inflation into account.

The first two Venoms finished their North American runs with $213.5 million each—yes, they had almost identical grosses—and it seems certain the new film won’t get close to that. But we’ll have to wait and see how it performs over the next week or two to get a sense of just how far it’s likely to fall behind those films.

Also worth noting: the Joker sequel cost a whopping $200 million to make—between three and four times what the original film cost—whereas the Venom sequel cost only $120 million, and it has already earned almost as much overseas (in one weekend) as the Joker sequel has earned in the entire past month.

So the Venom sequel has a much, much better chance of turning a profit.

But, while that’s good news for the studio at least, it doesn’t help theatres much, as they were counting on both of these films to sell tickets (and concessions).

Meanwhile, a few of this week’s other highlights:

• Smile 2 is dropping like a conventional horror movie, and not holding on to its audience the way the original Smile did.

• Conclave, a politically charged thriller about cardinals meeting in Rome to elect a new Pope, had a reasonably solid first weekend.

• Anora, a movie about a sex worker who marries the son of a Russian oligarch—it’s been getting a lot of awards buzz since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May—cracked the top ten despite playing in only 34 theatres.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: