'Venom' and 'Addams Family' Kick Off Fall Movie Season
by EG
October will start off with a busy weekend at the box office as two sequels and a prequel go into wide release at theaters. The sequels are the Marvel movie Venom: Let There Be Carnage and The Addams Family 2, and the prequel is The Many Saints of Newark, a backstory to the classic TV series The Sopranos. Read on for details.
Via Box Office Mojo.
September was a month of extremes at the box office, with both the highest grossing film of the year and the lowest grossing weekend since May. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is the first Marvel movie to open in September, and the gambit paid off, with the film crossing the gross of Black Widow to become the year’s number one movie, and it will soon overtake Bad Boys for Life to become the top grossing film since 2019. Other than Shang-Chi, though, the box office has been a total wasteland, with the next best opening weekend gross this month being Dear Evan Hansen’s meager $7.4 million. The dry spell is ending though, and after a rocky summer, the packed fall movie season is starting with a bang this weekend with Venom: Let There Be Carnage, The Many Saints of Newark, and The Addams Family 2, not to mention the international debut of No Time To Die.
Picking up where 2018’s Venom left off, Venom: Let There Be Carnage sees Tom Hardy return as Eddie Brock, the reporter who becomes the host of the Venom symbiote. Venom opened to $80 million three years ago in the same early October weekend slot, going on to gross $213.5 million in the U.S. and $856.1 million worldwide. Matching the original’s opening would put the sequel in the league of Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and F9: The Fast Saga, which seems unlikely. It has a a lot going for it, though, being the first major release in nearly a month, being theatrical exclusive, and having much better reviews than the original (67% on Rotten Tomatoes compared to 30%), all giving it a good shot of becoming the fourth best opener of the year, (the number to beat is A Quiet Place Part II’s $47.5 million opening). Most of the film’s international rollout will come later in October, and it does not have a release date in China, which was the original film’s biggest market with $269.2 million.
Venom 2 is directed by everyone’s favorite motion-capture-actor-turned-director Andy Serkis, and it is the second film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU). Michelle Williams returns, and Woody Harrelson joins the cast as Cletus Kasady, the serial killer who becomes the host of the symbiote Carnage. More Spidey villain films are on the way. The next SSU film is Morbius, with Jared Leto playing the vampire Mark Morbius in his first film appearance. The film is slated for January 28, 2022, and a Kraven the Hunter film starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson is scheduled for 2023.
Also opening is United Artists’ The Addams Family 2, going to theaters day-and-date with its premium VOD release, available to rent for $19.99. Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon return, as does the star-studded voice cast which includes Oscar Isaac, Charlize Theron, Chloë Grace Moretz, Snoop Dogg, and Bette Midler. The film comes two years after the original, which grossed $30.3 million in its opening weekend. This year’s biggest animated film so far has been The Boss Baby: Family Business, which opened to $16 million in July, only around one-third of the original Boss Baby’s opening weekend, though it should be noted the sequel was also available to watch on the Peacock streaming service. A similar drop off the original would put Addams Family 2 at roughly $10 million, but it is possible that parents have grown more comfortable taking their kids to the movies since July.
We are surprisingly seeing greater traffic on IMDb for The Many Saints of Newark than we are for Venom 2. The Sopranos prequel stars Michael Gandolfini, son of James Gandolfini, playing a young Tony Soprano, the role that launched his father into the limelight.
Get the rest of the story at Box Office Mojo.