The domestic box office performance of the sequels to the franchises that made movies out of the representative ‘anti-hero’ characters of Hollywood hero powerhouses Marvel and DC Comics is mixed.

Unlike DC‘s ‘Joker: Poly A Doe’, which failed miserably at the box office, Marvel’s anti-hero ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ is doing well, returning to the top of the box office despite the release of a competing film. However, both works are receiving equal amounts of criticism that they fall short of fans‘ expectations, which is disappointing.

The third series film, ‘Venom: The Last Dance’, which features the character ‘Venom’, who first appeared as a villain in the Spider-Man series in Marvel Comics and was reborn as an anti-hero, topped the box office from the 1st to the 3rd, its second week of release. It had been in first place since its release on the 23rd of last month, but fell to second place when Ryu Seung-ryong’s new film ‘Amazon Hwalmyeongsu’ was released, but it returned to the top in three days, surpassing 1.31 million cumulative viewers. It has been three months since ‘Alien: Romulus’ was released in August that a foreign film has surpassed 1 million.

On the other hand, ‘Joker: Poly A Doe’, which was released three weeks before ‘Venom’, received a box office performance that was below expectations and disappeared from theaters. ‘Joker’ is the first series to put Batman‘s arch-nemesis Joker at the forefront, and the first film, which was released in 2019, was a box office success, attracting over 5 million viewers. However, its sequel, ‘Joker: Polly a Doe’, only attracted 610,000 viewers due to mixed reviews about the genre, such as its change to a musical.

Although their domestic box office performances were mixed, both films received disappointing reviews, and as a result, they are struggling in North America as well, which seems to have added fuel to the declining popularity of superhero films.

‘Joker: Polly a Doe’ received a humiliating 32% freshness score (critic rating) on the global rating platform Rotten Tomatoes, while ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ is also recording a rating of just 40%. Even on IMDb, the world’s largest database (out of 10), they only received 5.3 and 6.2 points respectively, and on Metascore, a professional rating site, ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ received 41 points (out of 100), which was lower than ‘Joker: Polly a Doe’ (45 points).


Reporter Seungmi Lee smlee@donga.com