The Venom films have not exactly been critical darlings, but the billion-dollar franchise managed to succeed largely due to how appealing audiences found them. With Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy and company are going out on something of a low note, at least according to one meaningful metric: the movie earned a B- CinemaScore, the lowest of the franchise, likely indicating that Venom 3 will not have the kind of word-of-mouth that drove the first one to become an instant cult classic.
When they were released in theaters, both Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage got a B+. At the time, Let There Be Carnage was seen as overachieving a bit, since the more violent a movie is, the more members of the audience may be turned off. That might not hurt as much on Rotten Tomatoes, where the reviews tend to be written hours or days later, but CinemaScore polls people right outside the theater. Instead of thinking holistically about what a good time you had, you might be thinking about that one image you really want to get out of your head. Venom 3 may have failed to clear the bar that Carnage did, because it really pushed its PG-13 as far as it will go.
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That’s at odds with the PopcornMeter over on Rotten Tomatoes, where the audience score is 80% positive — the same as the first Venom. That ties it for second, since Venom: Let There Be Carnage scored 84%. That movie hasn’t aged as well as the first, with many fans now calling it the worst of the three, but it benefited from the first movie’s cult-camp status, and earned a whopping 57% positive reviews from critics (Venom only got 30%, and The Last Dance got 37%).
Venom managed to deliver a hit series for Sony in spite of the fact that Sony spent the last handful of years trying and failing to launch other Spider-Man-adjacent franchises like Morbius and Madame Web. Venom: The Last Dance — which Hardy has said will be his last ride with the symbiote — came out in theaters this weekend and grossed $51 million at the domestic box office, a franchise low.
Hardy’s Venom won’t be the last big-screen take on the character, of course; Venom originated as a Spider-Man villain, and as recently as Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Marvel Cinematic Universe teased the possibility of introducing symbiotes to the main-line universe. Some rumors peg Venom as the villain (or one of the villains) of Spider-Man 4, which was recently confirmed to be headed for production soon.