The song remains the same this weekend as Venom: The Last Dance follows our predictions from earlier this week and takes the top box office spot for the third weekend in a row. This marks yet another successful three-day outing for a franchise entry despite another drop in domestic dollars. While it will still go down as the lowest-grossing chapter in the series (by a long shot), it’s not the box office disaster some predicted it could be, with its take dwarfing that of Morbius, Madame Web, The Marvels, and Joker: Folie a Deux.

Without a whole lot of genuine competition, Venom: The Last Dance easily took the #1 spot this weekend, taking in $16.2 million and upping its total box office haul to just under $115 million. It’s worth noting that the first two movies in the series had each taken in somewhere around the $141-$142 million range domestically by their second weekend. The 2018 original would earn $213.5 million domestically and $856 million worldwide, while 2021’s Let There Be Carnage had similar domestic earnings but fared far worse worldwide with $501.5 million.

Regarding second place at the box office, both Heretic and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever were after the number two spot. But The Best Christmas Pageant Ever nabbed that spot with $11.1 million. Heretic – led by Hugh Grant and some post-Halloween horror fare – wasn’t far behind at all with an even $11 million. To note, the faith-based Best Christmas Pageant boasts a notable A CinemaScore rating, while Heretic only mustered a C rating, which isn’t that unusual for the genre.

The Wild Robot would take the fourth spot (it was at #2 last weekend), while Smile 2’s $5 million would round out the top five, pushing it past the $60 million mark.

Robert Zemeckis’ Here would continue its extremely fast slide into history with $2.4 million, putting it at the #8 spot after debuting at #5 last weekend with just under $5 million on a budget pegged upwards of 10 times as much (in due part to both starring Tom Hanks and making extensive use of de-aging AI.

Rounding out the top 10 would be Conclave at #6 ($4.1 million). That award-worthy drama only fell 19% this weekend, with a grand total of over $21 million. If word-of-mouth holds, expect it to be around $35 million domestically. Meanwhile, one of the fall’s most acclaimed films, Sean Baker’s Anora, finally cracked the top 10 at #7 with $2.5 million. A24’s We Live in Time hit #9 with 2.2 million, and Terrifier 3 hung in at the #10 spot with $1.5 million.

As mentioned, franchise fare has ruled the box office this fall, with only The Wild Robot breaking up such fare over the past few months, interrupting Beetlejuice Beetlejuice from its eventual $449 million worldwide haul. As far as original fare goes, you’d have to go back all the way to May for a non-franchise movie, when Paramount’s IF took the top spot.

Next week should be fairly slow at the box office, with the only major release that could rank as Red One, which stars Dwayne Johnson, J.K. Simmons, Chris Evans, and Lucy Liu. But this is all just a holdover until the pre-Thanksgiving boom, when we’ll see Wicked and Gladiator II stepping into the arena – or the Land of Oz, depending on your preferred venue – to fight it out for the top spot.

What did you catch at the movies this weekend? Which movies do you expect to reign supreme in the coming weeks?

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