Venom: The Last Dance Wins The Weekend Box Office Again As Heretic And The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Battle For Second Place

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Kelly Marcel's Venom: The Last Dance got off to a complicated start at the box office, as ticket sales domestically and internationally both managed to betray expectations. That being said, it has managed to stay at the top of the charts for the last few weeks, and it did so this weekend while in competition with two wide release titles that are still in the midst of battling for second place.

Venom: The Last Dance is the clear winner at the domestic box office, but will Dallas Jenkins' The Best Christmas Pageant Ever take the silver medal, or will it go to Scott Beck and Bryan Woods' Heretic? Check out the early numbers in the Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.

Crossing $100 Million Domestically, Venom: The Last Dance Stays In First Place

According to The Numbers, Venom: The Last Dance is tracking way behind its predecessors at the box office. It took 17 days for the new film to make $114.8 million in the United States and California, and both Ruben Fleisher's Venom and Andy Serkis' Venom: Let There Be Carnage each made that much money in the first eight days. That being said, it's still coasting at the top of the charts thanks to a lack of big, star-studded blockbuster competition (which isn't coming until this Friday with the arrival of Jake Kasdan's Red One starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans).

With a 37 percent weekend-to-weekend dip, Venom: The Last Dance made $16.2 million domestically over the last three days, making it the seventeenth release in 2024 to hit nine figures. It has now outgrossed Gil Kenan's Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire ($113.4 million), John Krasinski's IF ($111.1 million) and Fede álvarez's Alien: Romulus ($105.3 million). While it has its eyes now set on passing Chris Sanders' The Wild Robot ($130.9 million to date) in the record books, that's trickier given that the DreamWorks Animation hit is still hanging out in the Top 5.

The trilogy capper starring Tom Hardy, Juno Temple and Chiwetel Ejiofor hasn't had the kind of box office run at home that the industry had been anticipating, but some of the slack has been made up abroad.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage underperformed internationally at the box office because it came out when the theatrical industry was still trying to get back on its feet (the fall of 2021), and as I noted in my column last week, that led to 42.6 percent of the grosses coming from the United States and Canada. For the second sequel in the critically maligned series, the ratio has now pivoted back to what played out when Venom was released in 2018 – albeit with much smaller numbers.

Just 24.9 percent of the total ticket sales for Ruben Fleischer's blockbuster came from the domestic market, and for Venom: The Last Dance, it's 29.1 percent. The new 2024 movie has made $279.4 million in foreign markets, leading to a global gross to-date of $394.2 million. The film has now the thirteenth highest grossing film internationally released thus far this year, having just recently surpassed Lee Isaac Chung's Twisters ($369.7 million).

How much higher will it climb? Given the extreme competition heading to the box office in what remains of November, probably not much. Not only will it be squaring off with Red One this coming week, but Thanksgiving is jam packed with massive films this year including Jon Chu's Wicked and Ridley Scott's Gladiator II (which the industry hopes ends up being the second coming of Barbenheimer)

What Will End Up Taking Second Place? Heretic And The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Are Still Battling It Out

When box office numbers are reported on Sunday morning, it should be noted that they aren't final. After all, the final weekend numbers factor in Sunday evening ticket sales, and while the commonness of advance ticket purchasing provides us an accurate picture of what the results are going to be, we won't know for sure until tomorrow.

As such, it's not 100 percent clear at this present time what film is going to officially take second place this weekend: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever or Heretic. The two very different features both played in over 3,000 locations this weekend, and as per the early numbers, there is less than $100,000 separating them on the box office chart.

Per the numbers that are available right now, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever has the lead, with people evidently ready to get into the holiday spirit despite the fact that we haven't even gotten to Thanksgiving yet. The movie is based on the book of the same name by author Barbara Robinson and illustrator Judith Gwyn Brown, and it stars Judy Greer, Pete Holmes and Lauren Graham. Critics have certainly been showing it a lot of love, describing it as funny and festive.

Heretic, starring Hugh Grant, Sophie Thatcher, and Chloe East, has very different vibe, as it is delivering post-Halloween scares to the big screen – but it too has a lot of strong buzz going for it. The film premiered earlier this fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it has been hailed for its escalating tension, intelligent script and a terrific performance by Hugh Grant (as I noted in my four-star CinemaBlend review, it's one of the best horror movies of the year).

How will these rankings hold up when the aforementioned Red One arrives on the big screen this week? Will the action/adventure and A-list talent steal all of the attention away from Venom: The Last Dance? Will the Christmas energy lure folks away from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever? We won't know for sure until next Sunday, but I'll be back here on CinemaBlend to report on all of the box office developments with my next column when the numbers come in.