Venom, A Star Is Born Lead Record-Breaking Box Office Weekend

The seemingly disparate duo of Sony’s Venom and Warner Bros.’ A Star Is Born actually have far more in common than you’d think—they both came out last Friday, Oct. 5, they’ve both been described as romances, and they share a director of photography (!)—but their clearest commonality is their popularity with audiences. The two films blew box-office expectations away to the tune of some $122 million, propelling this past weekend’s total take to an approximate $172 million. That’s good for the biggest October box office weekend of all time, per Box Office Mojo.

Venom was a record breaker right out of the gate, topping the October record for preview earnings last Thursday, Oct. 4, ahead of its wide release the next day. The Ruben Fleischer-directed, Tom Hardy-starring Marvel antihero film made an estimated $80 million in its opening weekend, shattering another record with the biggest October opening weekend of all time by surpassing the $55.7 million mark set by Gravity in 2013. That’s Star Wars territory, folks: Although Solo: A Star Wars Story was deemed a box-office flop relative to the rest of that money-printing franchise, it opened to $84.4 million domestic, meaning Eddie Brock spent his weekend nipping at Han’s heels. And that’s not all: Venom raked in $125.2 million overseas, setting yet another October opening record with $205 million worldwide. Even in light of the film’s $100 million production budget and “tens of millions of dollars in marketing costs” (per The NYT), this haul practically guarantees that the Venom sequel, which Woody Harrelson had already all but confirmed, will indeed see the light of day, bad reviews be damned.