Say what you will about Ruben Fleischer’s standalone Venom movie – criticisms range from dull and dated to flat-out ridiculous – but you can’t deny that the Spider-Man spinoff has rocked the international box office.
In just three weeks, Venom has scored precisely $175M at the domestic market, which, according to the latest figures from Box Office Mojo, accounts for 37 percent of the film’s global cume. Like all other superhero tentpoles, Sony’s star-studded epic appears to have fared better overseas, where it’s collected close to $300M hitherto.
Add those two figures together and you arrive at $475M, which is impressive in and of itself for an October movie, not to mention the fact that Venom was effectively torn to pieces by critics and audience members alike. But there’s still life in the old symbiote yet, and Deadline is reporting today that the film is now expected to gobble up an additional $25M-plus this weekend, during which time it will almost certainly blaze past $500M at the worldwide box office.
To add a little more perspective, Deadline points out that Venom is currently the #1 movie in the likes of Korea, Russia ($28.8M), the UK ($22.5M), Mexico ($21.7M) and Brazil ($15.8M). We should warn you that those numbers account for box office tallies through Tuesday.
So is Venom critic-proof? Unlikely, but we should still recognize the ways in which the movie’s star power – Tom Hardy, Riz Ahmed, Michelle Williams… to name but a few – has really helped propel it to the tip-top of the box office charts, where it’ll likely remain for another few days at the very least.
At $466M and counting, Venom continues to perform pretty well, all things considered, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on the film’s box office journey as more information comes to light.