'Venom: Let There Be Carnage' Shatters Pandemic-Era Box Office With $90.1M Opening Weekend

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” scored the highest-grossing opening weekend since U.S. movie theaters reopened from the pandemic, with $90.1 million in ticket sales at the domestic box office.

What Happened: A sequel to the 2018 “Venom” with Tom Hardy returning in the starring role as the journalist with an alien symbiote in his body, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” opened in 4,225 theaters and broke the pandemic-era opening record set by The Walt Disney Co.’s DIS “Black Widow,” which took in $80.8 million, However, “Black Widow” was simultaneously released in theaters and on the Disney+ streaming service while Sony Pictures Releasing SONY made “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” a theatrical-exclusive release.

Another new film, the animated “The Addams Family 2” from United Artists Releasing grossed $18 million in ticket sales from 4,207 theaters; the film was also available for home viewing as a rent on-demand title. Disney’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” dropped from the top-grossing film ranking it held for the past four weeks to third place with $6 million in ticket sales from 3,455 screens.

The weekend’s big disappointment was “The Many Saints of Newark” from AT&T’s Warner Bros., which debuted in fourth place with $5 million in ticket sales from 3,181 theaters. The film, a prequel to “The Sopranos” television series, was also released on HBO Max. The musical “Dear Evan Hansen” from Comcast’s CMCSA Universal Pictures, finished in fifth place with $2.45 million from 3,664 theaters.

Two under-the-radar titles crashed the top 10 list of top-grossing films: "Chal Mera Putt 3," a Punjabi-language film about Indian illegal immigrants in England, placed ninth with $640,000 from 90 theaters, and Lionsgate's (NYSE: LGF-A) faith-based "The Jesus Music" in tenth with $560,200 from 249 theaters.

What Happens Next: Looking ahead, the big release for Oct. 8 is “No Time to Die,” Daniel Craig’s final film in the 007 franchise. The film has been on the shelf for two years – the initial November 2019 release was postponed due to production delays created by the departure of Danny Boyle as director, while the COVID-19 pandemic kept the film off the screen throughout 2020.

As this United Artists Releasing offering is expected to steamroll its way to the top of the box office, no other major films are going into direct competition. A24 has the only other nationwide release for the upcoming weekend with “Lamb,” a horror film about a rural couple in Iceland who find a very unusual animal in their sheep barn.

Opening on Oct. 8 in limited release is the French import "Suzanna Andler" starring Charlotte Gainsbourg as a middle-aged mother who departs from her unfaithful husband for a rendezvous with a younger lover, and the documentary “The Gig is Up,” focusing on the lives of workers in the platform economy companies including Amazon AMZN and Uber UBER.

Over on the streaming side, Disney+ is premiering “Muppets Haunted Mansion,” with Kermit and the gang joined in a pre-Halloween romp with Will Arnett, Danny Trejo, Taraji P. Henson, John Stamos, Sasheer Zamata and Chrissy Metz.

Lost Film Recovered: On Oct. 6, the BFI London Film Festival will premiere “Europa,” a 12-minute experimental work made in 1931 by Polish filmmakers Stefan and Franciszka Themerson that was believed to have been irrevocably lost.

Based on the 1925 poem by Anatol Stern, “Europa” offered an avant-garde consideration of the rise of fascism across Europe. The Themersons left Poland before the start of World War II and settled in Paris, taking a single print of “Europa” with them. But during the Nazi occupation of the French capital, the “Europa” print was confiscated and never seen again.

According to the BFI, the print was long believed to have been destroyed by the Nazis. However, it was sent back to Berlin and deposited in the Reich Film Archive (Reichsfilmarchiv), which was taken over by the Communist East German government during the Cold War. When Germany was reunified in 1990, the print was transferred to the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv), where it was rediscovered by the Commission for Looted Art in Europe in 1999.

Photos: Tom Hardy in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage" courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing; image from “Europa” courtesy of the BFI.