NEW YORK (AP) — “Venom: The Last Dance” showed less bite than expected at the box office, raking in $51 million in its opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, a significant drop from previous entries from the alien symbiote franchise.

Projections for Sony Pictures’ third “Venom” film were closer to $65 million. More worrying, however, was the decline of the first two “Venom” films. The 2018 original debuted with $80.2 million, while the 2021 follow-up, “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” opened with $90 million even as theaters were still in lockdown mode. recovery during the pandemic.

“The Last Dance,” starring Tom Hardy as a journalist who shares his body with an alien entity also voiced by Hardy, could still turn a profit for Sony. Its production budget, not including promotion and marketing, was approximately $120 million, significantly less than most comic book films.

But “The Last Dance” is also performing better abroad. Internationally, “Venom: The Last Dance” raked in $124 million over the weekend, including $46 million over five days of release in China. That’s enough for one of the best international weekends of the year for a Hollywood release.

Yet neither the reviews (36% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) nor audience scores (a low “B-” CinemaScore for the franchise) have been good for the film written by Kelly Marcel and Hardy and directed by Marcel.

The weak weekend of “Venom: The Last Dance” also likely guarantees that superhero movies will have their weakest year in a dozen years, not counting the pandemic year of 2020, according to David A. Gross , a film consultant who publishes a newsletter for Franchise Entertainment.

On the heels of the flop “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Gross estimates that 2024 superhero films will gross around $2.25 billion worldwide. The only upcoming installment is Marvel’s “Kraven the Hunter,” which is scheduled for release on December 13. Even with “Deadpool & Wolverine’s” $1.3 billion, the genre hasn’t, overall, dominated the way it once did. In 2018, for example, superhero films accounted for more than $7 billion in global ticket sales.

Last week’s top film, Paramount Pictures’ horror sequel “Smile 2,” fell to second place with $9.4 million. That brings its two-week total to $83.7 million worldwide.

The biggest success of the weekend might have been “Conclave,” the papal thriller starring Ralph Fiennes and directed by Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front”). The Focus Features film, a major Oscar contender, opened with $6.5 million from 1,753 theaters.

That put “Conclave” in third place, making it the rare adult-oriented drama to make its mark theatrically. Some 77% of ticket buyers were aged over 35, Focus said. With a strong opening and excellent reviews, “Conclave” could continue to gain momentum with moviegoers and Oscar voters.