Box office: ‘Venom’ is playing like a ‘Spider-Man’ sequel, but which one?

It would appear that the strong Sunday-to-Monday holds were partially due to Columbus Day. As such, Venom just missed the $100 million milestone yesterday, with a still-solid $8.223m Tuesday gross (-15% from Monday) and a still-strong $98.11m five-day total. So, yeah, it’ll cross $100m sometime today, perhaps by the end of this sentence. It’s still a record gross for a Tuesday in October, sans inflation, and still positions the film for a solid domestic run. There has been lots of talk this week with the presumption that the film is going to sink like a stone this coming weekend. But A) that might not happen and B) it opened so well, especially in relation to its budget, that it hardly matters if it flames out like a Twilight sequel.

Oddly enough, the best comparisons for what might happen over the next month is the recent Spider-Man movies. If the film plays to the fans and everyone else stays away, then we’re probably looking at a run like Spider-Man 3 ($336 million domestic from a Venom-enhanced $151m debut weekend in 2007) or Amazing Spider-Man 2 (a $202m domestic total from a $91m debut weekend in 2014). So that’s a straight-up over/under 2.22x weekend-to-domestic finish multiplier, which would be a $177m domestic cume. That would be just fine for a $100m-budgeted origin story that has already earned $250m worldwide as of yesterday with China still on tap for Nov. 2.