It’s true that terrible reviews coupled with a disinterested concept can lead to disappointing box office success, as with Sony’s Spider-Villainverse, which of course was the case to some extent with Madame Web and Morbius. But there’s one series that’s completely immune to it, Venom, and now Venom: The Last Dance, the final film in the trilogy, is destined to leave behind the terrible reviews that fans don’t seem to care about.

Venom: The Last Dance currently has a very poor 37% on Rotten Tomatoes from 71 critics. Very, very bad. But…this is Venom. And people love Venom, no matter how stupid it may be. 2018’s Venom had an even worse critic score of 30%, but a 50% higher audience score of 80%. “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” still scored an abysmal 57% from critics and an even higher score of 84% from viewers. People love these stupid movies (me too, to be clear).

There is a real discrepancy here that we don’t often see. I’ve been following audience and critic ratings of MCU films for a while now, and they’re usually relatively close. In almost any circumstance, there is nothing better than a 50% gap.

And how much these fans like these films leads to big box office returns. “Venom: The Last Dance” could open with $150 million worldwide, immediately exceeding its budget. The original “Venom” grossed $856 million worldwide. “Let There Be Carnage” reached fewer, but still half a billion worldwide. Even if The Last Dance continues to decline, it will still be very profitable.

Tom Hardy has repeatedly expressed that he is done with Venom after this, but Sony has firmly said that the symbiote part of their world is far from finished, and they have promoted this film to introduce Knull, played by the indomitable Andy Serkis, and an all-rounder – sometimes scary Marvel villain. So are we getting… Knull movies? Or will the Venom symbiote find a new host? Will this universe ever get its own Spider-Man or merge with the MCU? We don’t know, but Sony isn’t going to give up on this since Venom is the only truly successful installment in this mini-universe (we’ll see how the Kraven movie does, but I don’t have high hopes for it). The).

We should expect “Venom: The Last Dance” to be a success, but this idea that you can make a superhero movie that critics hate, that audiences love and that makes a lot of money isn’t something you should often try to replicate , because it almost never happens. I’m glad Venom was able to buck this trend.

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