In the lead-up to the release of Venom, last week saw a strange rivalry spring up between Eddie Brock’s supporters and Lady Gaga fans, with the former accusing the latter of spreading negative reviews of the new Spidey spinoff in order to improve A Star is Born’s chances at the box office. Despite this alleged smear campaign, the first entry into Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters (yes, that’s what the franchise is called) trounced Bradley Cooper’s critical darling with a record-breaking opening weekend.
But now we’ve arrived at weekend number two, and things are still going pretty well for Mr. Brock. From what we understand, Eddie earned $35.7 million and toppled both A Star is Born and First Man to grab the number one spot once again. Furthermore, its domestic total now sits at $142.8 million (thanks to the $80 million last weekend) and its foreign haul has risen to $235.3 million. In case you can’t do the math, that means Venom has now collected $378.1 million worldwide. Not bad for a film that critics called as bad as Catwoman, eh?
To compare Venom with a few of its peers, a recent ranking of the opening weekends of superhero origin movies placed the Ruben Fleischer-helmed pic ahead of the much better-reviewed Thor and even Captain America: The First Avenger. It probably goes without saying at this point that a sequel feels like a distinct possibility, with the movie even teasing Venom 2‘s villain with its mid-credits sequence. Spoilers: it’s Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady, who goes on to become Carnage.
Back to those box office numbers, though, and looking across the pond, the film has yet to make its all-important China debut. That’ll no doubt add even more to its global haul and like we mentioned above, it seems highly likely at this point that the symbiote saga will be getting the second outing that it so clearly wants.
In the meantime, if you haven’t seen Venom yet, then feel free to give it a watch and decide for yourself whether you’d like to see Tom Hardy to go face to face with a PG-13 Carnage.