The Delta variant of the novel coronavirus has once again made Hollywood push pause on a number of projects that were supposed to hit theaters, but one Marvel movie apparently has found an opening in the schedule and actually moved up its release date to earlier in the fall.
Deadline reported on Monday that the Venom sequel that had seen a delay to October 15 — and was reportedly in danger of another push into 2022 — actually pushed its release up two weeks. This comes following a series of delays and rumors about its release date that seem to have been tied to how well another Marvel film, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, performed over Labor Day amid the still-ongoing pandemic.
It was the worst kept secret in Hollywood that Sony was bound to vacate Venom: Let There Be Carnage from its Oct. 15 release date, but after the enormous $90M Labor Day weekend success of Disney/Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the Culver City lot has decided to go earlier with their own Marvel sequel on Oct. 1.
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This returns Venom to its early October stomping ground, the first movie in 2018 setting an opening domestic record for the month with $80.2M before Warner Bros’ Joker pushed the Marvel pic to No. 2 for October a year later with $96.2M. I’ve heard that tracking among males is really hot for Venom 2, and Sony has every reason in the world to keep it in 2021 versus pushing the Andy Serkis-directed pic to January 22 (which was the rumor).
It’s certainly welcome news for fans who wanted to see Let There Be Carnage as soon as possible, and Shang-Chi setting a box office record over the weekend seems to indicate, despite all the Black Widow drama about poor box office numbers, that people still will go out and see movies in the pandemic. Given the chaos that the first Tom Hardy-let Venom had in it, this certainly has a lot of buzz heading into the fall. As the Deadline report notes, there was a lot of competition for the film on October 15, so they decided to let everyone get a little Carnage at the start of the month, as a treat.
[via Deadline]