Venom: The Last Dance opens with $8 million in early Thursday previews

Despite not having the greatest reputation, the Sony Spider-Villain-Verse managed to complete a trilogy of films with one of its properties that exists adjacent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Venom: The Last Dance premiered yesterday at 3,500 locations starting at 2 pm. The Tom Hardy-led movie currently sports a 36% rating at Rotten Tomatoes with a 77% Popcornmeter (which is the new name for the audience score). That critic aggregate falls well below the prior installment’s 57%, but it does come out ahead of the first film’s rating of 30%.

According to Deadline, Venom: The Last Dance‘s Thursday early preview would reach about $8 million. This early weekend total may put the film on the road to opening to $65 million. That would again fall short of its predecessor’s opening total of $90 million, but that installment also included the appearance of the equally popular villain character — Carnage. Comparatively, the Dwayne Johnson superhero film attempt Black Adam opened just below this total with early previews of $7.6 million and would finish the weekend with $67 million.

Inversely, Joker: Folie à Deux‘s early Thursday previews would come out to $7 million, but the film would not keep momentum as it only grossed $37.6 million on opening weekend. Joker‘s word of mouth likely worked against the film, but the Venom movies seem reliable on giving the audience just what they expect without pulling the rug from under them.

Our own Chris Bumbray though the movie was just average as he says in his review, “In the end, like all the other Venom movies, this is a mixed bag. Director Kelly Marcel makes her directorial debut after working as a writer and producer on other movies. She certainly is as capable behind the camera as any other director who worked on the franchise. She’s delivered a fun movie, with the last half hour offering us the best take on the character we’ve seen so far, but I daresay it’s maybe too little to redeem the franchise in a significant way. None of the films have been offensively bad, but with Hardy in the lead role and some cast members brought in throughout the franchise, the Venom series should have been bigger and better. It was fine as a whole, but is fine really good enough anymore?”