The top three films — Venom: The Last Dance, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and Heretic — in a Veterans Day weekend sans a major tentpole, overperformed this weekend.

The biggest eyebrow raiser is that Lionsgate/Kingdom Story’s Best Christmas Pageant Ever had a better than anticipated hold ($2.9M vs. $3.3M) on Saturday, putting the Dallas Jenkins-directed family movie neck-in-neck with Heretic for a No. 2 upset with $11M apiece. Lionsgate is calling No. 2 at $11.1M.

Venom: The Last Dance‘s third weekend is $16.2M, -37%. With all the great holds for this threequel, why didn’t Sony just give Christmas a potential fanboy tentpole and play this to a massive multiple instead of the thrice moved Kraven the Hunter, which is opening on Dec. 13? Odds are that the less than $130M R-rated Marvel deep universe title needs a Christmas 5x multiple more than Venom 3. Imax brought in $1.5M on the Tom Hardy movie for a running total in their auditoriums of $10M.

Read more at Deadline

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