Venom: Let There Be Carnage's Rotten Tomatoes score shows how little impact critical reviews can have the box office. Let There Be Carnage's Rotten Tomatoes 59% score is a big improvement from the first Venom's 30%, but both are still rated "Rotten." Even so, the original was a box office smash hit, and Let There Be Carnage is even bigger (in the post-pandemic box office, no less), proving low Tomatometer scores have less impact on a movie's financial performance than generally accepted sentiment would suggest.
The MCU's streak of unparalleled success in both the box office and Rotten Tomatoes gives the impression of correlation and causation, with many naturally assuming box office and Rotten Tomatoes go hand-in-hand, but it's clear the answer is a bit more complicated. Venom certainly isn't the first time a counter-example has been provided, but the franchise's repeated success and Venom's ancillary Marvel connection provide an interesting counterpoint.
The first Venom movie scored just 30% on Rotten Tomatoes, yet went on to gross $856 million at the worldwide box office, whereas the MCU's pre-pandemic non-Avengers movie box office average is just under $780 million. Venom: Let There Be Carnage opened to much more positive reviews, but has since also fallen into Rotten territory. If you were to compare the scores to the rest of the MCU, both would be squarely at the bottom, yet the first Venom's box office is well above average for the MCU, and Venom: Let There Be Carnage is off to an even stronger start at the box office. It may be hard to compare its post-pandemic performance to the pre-pandemic MCU, but its opening weekend is already the strongest seen since the pandemic, beating both 2021 MCU movies, Black Widow and Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Considering it was also made for a much lower budget than either of those movies, it's shaping up to be one of the most successful 2021 theatrical releases.
Of course, Venom isn't the first franchise to prove this about Rotten Tomatoes. Every single Transformers movie was rated Rotten on Rotten Tomatoes prior to Bumblebee, yet most of them performed fairly well at the box office. Ironically, Bumblebee was the first Transformers movie to finally score a Fresh score on the Tomatometer, yet it turned out to be the lowest-performing Transformers movie to date. The first four Fast and the Furious movies' scores were also Rotten, however, in that case, the score trended upwards alongside box office for later installments. Venom is notable, though, because of its ancillary connection to the MCU as a Marvel product, proving the MCU's Rotten Tomatoes and box office are a correlation, not causation.
While Rotten Tomatoes' critic scores don't inherently destroy box office, the audience score may actually be a better indicator. After all, the audience is the one buying the tickets. Audience scores can be finicky, but if you compare to the audience scores to the Marvel Studios produced MCU movies, Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage have an 81% and 85%, respectively, straddling the MCU's 83% average. We'll have to see what box office performance in subsequent weeks looks like, but so far it's clear audiences aren't deterred by the Venom franchise's harsh reviews.