Box Office Report: Let's Dance the Last Dance

Venom and Eddie Brock are breaking up. The surprisingly successful Venom franchise is coming to an end. The Sony-Marvel Spidey-verse villain franchise has largely been a flop but this weird story about a sweaty man and his emotional support parasite has proven to be curiously appealing to the masses. Well, until now. It’s not that Venom: The Last Dance is doing terribly, but it did open to a franchise low.

Venom: The Last Dance earned $51 million from 4,131 theatres. That’s behind initial studio projections of $65 million and lower than the domestic openings of the first two movies ($80m and $90m, respectively.) According to Variety, ‘Sony believes the World Series matchup between the Yankees and the Dodgers kept people at home on Saturday and Sunday, yet New York City and Los Angeles were the two biggest markets for Venom 3.’ That’s baseball, right? But the movie is still doing pretty decently abroad, which has bolstered its current worldwide total gross to $175 million. These movies have also cost way less than many other superhero movies, like Joker: Folie a Deux, so it’ll be easier to get into the black in the coming weeks.

Debuting at number three is Conclave, the papal political thriller, with $6.5 million from 1,753 theatres. This one is a classic crowd pleaser and it was strongly reviewed out of the festival circuit, so I imagine that Focus Features will want this one to stick around for the next few months. It could be a slow-burn hit if it finds its audience.

Anora became an Oscar contender the moment it premiered at Cannes and then won the Palme d’Or. The distributor, Neon, has a great reputation for taking films from Cannes to the Academy Awards, and they’re playing it slow and safe with Sean Baker’s latest. It opened to 34 theatres this past weekend, up from six, and saw a 57.5% increase in attendance. It averaged $25,504 per cinema, which was impressive enough to get the movie into the top ten, well ahead of The Substance and Joker: Folie a Deux. This strategy worked well for another Neon movie, Parasite, so they’ll be hoping lightning strikes twice.

In limited release news: the hot beast romance Your Monster made $515,000 from 651 locations; the stop-motion animated drama Memoir of a Snail earned $69,000 from only five places; documentary Dahomey, which won the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, grossed $18,879 from two theatres; and Black Box Diaries, journalist Shiori Ito’s investigation into her own sexual assault, brought in $7,000 from one theatre.

This coming week sees the release of Sundance drama A Real Pain, animation Hitpig, and survival drama Lost on a Mountain in Maine.

You can check out the rest of the weekend box office here.