Why Venom 3 Might Not Be a Flop After All, Despite a Soft Opening Weekend

You don’t have to be a box office expert to know that opening weekends are crucial when evaluating a movie’s financial performance — but they aren’t everything.

Case in point: Venom: The Last Dance, Sony’s capper to its Spider-Man spinoff trilogy. The headlines were dismal on its opening weekend when it premiered to $51 million at the U.S. box office, the worst debut in series history. But the story has changed somewhat over the past few weeks and now, after three weeks at the top of the box office and strong hauls from international markets, Venom 3 is close to passing the $400 million mark.

Per numbers the studios collected by Comscore, Venom: The Last Dance’s worldwide total now stands at $394 million. A solid $279 million of that comes from international audiences, meaning that while it may not be a huge hit stateside, it’s got some strong legs overseas.

There are a couple of other factors at play here: for one, little competition. Even though Venom: The Last Dance hasn’t exactly been a blockbuster in North America, it’s still managed to stay at #1 at the domestic box office for three weeks. Coming behind Venom 3 domestically this weekend are comedy The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and horror film Heretic, with the rest of the Top 10 filled by non-superhero holdovers. It could, however, face some competition from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson action comedy Red One, which just debuted in international territories at #2 for the weekend and opens in North American theaters on Friday.

And all that being said, Venom: The Last Dance isn’t exactly in the clear just yet. It’ll need to keep gaining traction with international crowds to reach the $500 million heights of its predecessor, Let There Be Carnage, and it’s safe to say at this point that it won’t approach the $856 million of the first film. Still, with a reported $120 million production budget, it faces less pressure than some of its more expensive peers in the comic-book movie genre.

It’s also a bit of neutral news in a genre that’s seen some difficulties as of late. Joker: Folie à Deux is already something of an infamous flop, failing to recover from what analysts called an “unmitigated disaster” of an opening weekend. Other comic-book movies over the past couple of years, including The Flash, The Marvels, and Madame Web, have underperformed, with the very notable exception of this summer’s $1 billion Marvel hit Deadpool & Wolverine.

We’ll have to see if international territories countinue to be eager to wave goodbye to Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock, but hey, it’s got a shot. For more on Venom: The Last Dance, read our 4/10 review, where we said it “trips over its own tendrils and lets a boring, generic plot, and bad action distract from the surprisingly resilient central relationship between Eddie Brock and his symbiote bestie.”

Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.