One of the central questions about Sony’s Venom movie has been about its rating, and now the answer has officially arrived: Venom is going to be PG-13.
Also, some new box office tracking numbers have arrived and have zeroed in on how the film might perform during its opening weekend. If these numbers are correct, Tom Hardy‘s anti-superhero movie is about to break a box office record.
Early reports about this Venom film presented the project as an R-rated movie with elements of sci-fi and horror mixed in. The prospect made some sense in the wake of the mega-success of Fox’s R-rated take on Deadpool, but Erik Davis from Fandango reports that the Venom rating is officially PG-13, confirming rumors from about a month ago, and Davis relays word from “studio sources” about why that decision was made:
Meanwhile, Deadline reports that updated tracking numbers for Venom have arrived, and that the movie is now aiming for an opening weekend somewhere between $60M-$70M. The earliest tracking suggested an opening between $30M-$50M; that was updated to $55M-$85M estimate, and now analysts are dialing in as we approach the film’s release date. If it does indeed open with anywhere between $60M-$70M, that would put Venom atop 2013’s Gravity as the movie with the highest-grossing opening weekend in October history. (Gravity currently holds the record with $55.7M.)
These predictions are still relatively early, and as we saw earlier this summer with Solo: A Star Wars Story, a big budget tentpole film like this experiencing an underwhelming opening is a very real possibility. Personally, I was expecting this to bomb, but with a record-breaking opening on the horizon, I keep coming back to screenwriter William Goldman’s famous quote: “Nobody knows anything…Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”