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Venom bites head off October box office record

The creepy Symbiote wraps itself around all the other films, though Lady Gaga's A Star is Born remake also does well.

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper
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Venom is ready for his close-up.

 Sony Pictures

The weekend box-office competition took a licking from Venom and his extraordinarily creepy tongue. Despite some not-so-lovely reviews, the creepy Symbiote, played by Tom Hardy, destroyed the previous box-office record for October, earning $80 million. That record had been held by 2013's Gravity, which opened to $55.8 million.

A very different movie took second place: Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper's remake of A Star is Born earned $41.3 million.

More on Venom

With those two major openings helped out by other films, this was "easily the best October (box-office) weekend ever," the Associated Press reported.

Venom wasn't just a North American favorite. It crushed the international box office as well, earning $125.2 million, led by South Korean receipts of $16.3 million. That's an international record for an October opening, Variety reports.

Venom should have the superhero box office to itself for a while, according to Box Office Mojo. There are no other major superhero film release dates until Aquaman and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse arrive in December.