Box Office Weekend – ‘Venom’ Not Box Office Poison While ‘A Star is Born’ Shines Brightly
This weekend at the box office, Venom managed to overperform expectations in the face of negative critical reception while A Star is Born had a solid opening for an awards-contender.
Venom easily managed to secure an October record for best opening of the month with an estimated bow that’s just over $80M. Critics be damned, the market was missing a superhero movie for the past few months and Sony was there to deliver. While the movie will need to make an estimated $450M globally to reach the point where it can profit off of a $100M production budget, that shouldn’t be too hard for a movie like this to do, barring the real possibility of huge second-weekend and third-weekend drop-offs. It’s already about halfway there before opening in markets like China, so Sony can take a sigh of relief knowing that their universe of Spider-Man spin-offs that have absolutely no connection to the current iteration of Spider-Man can somehow work. Still, there’s no guarantee that audiences will take interest in Morbius or Kraven movies without Spider-Man in them, so Venom‘s critic-proof box office opening shouldn’t be cause for Sony to celebrate and announce a handful of sequels and spin-offs just yet.
Meanwhile, A Star is Born from Warner Bros. has secured a stellar opening of over $40M in what will likely be the start of a leggy run, as the movie’s awards-season hype, combined with its appeal to a general audience, has already pushed it past its $30M production budget domestically in what’s being hailed as a solid start for Bradley Cooper’s career as a director and Lady Gaga’s career as a lead actress. WB has another thing to celebrate in the form of a great 35% hold for their animated feature Smallfoot; while the movie certainly won’t be making The LEGO Movie or The LEGO Batman Movie numbers, it shouldn’t have an issue topping the likes of Storks, an animated movie not based on an existing intellectual property.
Most of the weekend’s box office holdovers held over pretty well, and Crazy Rich Asians is set to pass $170M by the start of the next weekend. The two notable exceptions include White Boy Rick (which is a case of an awards-contender that didn’t catch on like Sony had hoped) and The Predator (which should still crawl past $50M domestically); both of those movies shed over a thousand theaters this weekend and 75% of the gross they made in the previous weekend, which is why there are such drastic drops. In addition, Fox’s The Hate U Give had a limited opening this weekend to $500K. For 36 theaters, that’s a strong start, but it came one spot shy of being on the Top Twelve. For that, you can thank Free Solo, which was developed by National Geographic Entertainment (also a Fox-owned company, and soon to be Disney-owned) and eked The Hate U Give‘s box office just enough to earn the spot directly above it with $540K in 41 theaters.
The Top Twelve box office performances for the three-day weekend can be summarized as follows (bolded titles are new releases):
- Venom (Sony Pictures) – $80.03M Total.
- A Star is Born (Warner Bros.) – $41.25M Total.
- Smallfoot (Warner Bros./Warner Animation Group) – $14.9M Weekend/$42.76M Total; 35.3% Drop.
- Night School (Universal Pictures) – $12.275M Weekend/$46.75M Total; 55% Drop.
- The House with a Clock in Its Walls (Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment) – $7.295M Weekend/$55.05M Total; 42.1% Drop.
- A Simple Favor (Lionsgate) – $3.435M Weekend/$49.014M Total; 47.5% Drop.
- The Nun (Warner Bros./New Line) – $2.61M Weekend/$113.367M Total; 51.9% Drop.
- Hell Fest (CBS Films/Lionsgate) – $2.075M Weekend/$8.864M Total; 59.6% Drop.
- Crazy Rich Asians (Warner Bros.) – $2.06M Weekend/$169.134M Total; 49.8% Drop.
- The Predator (20th Century Fox) – $900K Weekend/$49.985M Total; 76.7% Drop.
- White Boy Rick (Sony Pictures/Studio 8) – $575K Weekend/$23.323M Total; 76.1% Drop.
- Free Solo (National Geographic Entertainment) – $540K Total.
Crazy Rich Asians, The Nun, The Predator, Venom, and A Star is Born are now playing in theaters.
Grant Davis is a freelance writer who has covered entertainment news for more than seven years. His articles have frequently appeared in Star Wars News Net as well as as other entertainment-related websites. As someone who grew up on Star Wars and comic book movies, he’s completely thrilled with the current era of genre entertainment.
