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A mass of negative press couldn’t hurt Ruben Fleischer’s Spider-villain who walked away with the weekend and the biggest opening in October history worldwide, domestically and overseas.
“Venom”, starring Tom Hardy as a possessed bum, snared a sumly $205 million worldwide at the box office over the weekend, coming in ahead of expectations – especially internationally, where it took home $125.2M but had estimated to snag $110M.
The film was also a success in Korea, where it topped figures made by more critically-acclaimed superhero fare like ”Wonder Woman” and “Captain America : The First Avenger”.
Mexico scored Sony a best-opening day ever and the country’s highest opening-ever for a standalone superhero film.
Seems in this case, those poor reviews and acidic Tweets – alongside a 32% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes – only encouraged punters to see what’s unarguably one of the more radical, and slightly loopy comic book movies of the year.
“A Star is Born”, though generating very positive reviews, didn’t make as much bank as expected on the weekend (it snared $14M on 4,590 screens in 31 markets) but the film is still yet to open in many territories and has a long road ahead of it as the months inch closer to Awards season.
If that mid end-credits sequence is anything to go by, there’s been some work done on a “Venom” sequel already – and it’ll likely feature a former ‘Cheers’ bartender as one of it’s main rogues – but these numbers suggest Sony will be locking in a release date and writer’s room come Monday.
Big question though, why was that character not used in this first flick?
“We’d like to think that this movie will expand to other movies and Carnage is, I think, the most beloved of the Venom adversaries, with the exception of probably Spider-Man,” director Ruben Fleischer tells IGN. “And so we definitely didn’t want to include Carnage in this first movie because it felt like we wanted to establish Eddie and Venom and so that’s why we worked having Riot as our main adversary. But the intention or the ambition was to show that there are legs for the franchise in that a fan favorite let alone played by Woody Harrelson would be something we could look forward to in the future.”
He added, “Now that we’ve established them and grounded them and built their dynamic, now we can pit them against their biggest foe, which is Carnage.”
“It’ll be interesting to see how Carnage comes to life in the films,” Fleischer went on to say. “In the comics, he’s a spawn of Venom’s and basically he and Eddie in the comics are cell mates and so that’s why we put him in a jail cell and even though Eddie’s not arrested at the movie — because we talked about that. Maybe Eddie’s like arrested and he’s in jail and who should be next to him but Cletus Kasady. That probably would’ve been the truest to the comic version but I don’t think we wanted Eddie to go to jail at the end of our movie. That would’ve been a bit of a bummer. But we did want to have them in jail cell proximity and so we left the door open for how Venom can spawn Carnage and how Cletus might someday become that character.”
