Weekend Box Office: ‘First Man’ Can’t Top ‘Venom’

Damien Chazelle’s one giant leap for mankind wasn’t big enough to top last week’s box office champs Venom or A Star Is Born. This weekend the Neil Armstrong biopic landed in third place while the Sony Spider-Man spinoff and Lady Gaga-led remake remained on top yet again. Here’s the full weekend box office chart:

	Film	Weekend	Per Screen	Total
1	Venom	$35,700,000 (-56%)	$8,400	$142,802,151
2	A Star Is Born	$28,000,000 (-35%)	$7,551	$94,160,360
3	First Man	$16,500,000	$4,533	$16,500,000
4	Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween	$16,225,000	$4,608	$16,225,000
5	Smallfoot	$9,300,000 (-35%)	$2,579	$57,608,221
6	Night School	$8,035,000 (-36%)	$2,890	$59,843,950
7	Bad Times At the El Royale	$7,225,000	$2,573	$7,225,000
8	The House With a Clock In Its Walls	$3,975,000 (-46%)	$1,424	$62,251,500
9	The Hate You Give	$1,765,000 (+245%)	$7,117	$2,477,314
10	A Simple Favor	$1,380,000 (-60%)	$950	$52,037,508

This weekend’s biggest new release was Chazelle’s La La Land follow-up, expected to be a big Oscar contender. But competing with a surprise hit about an alien who likes tater tots and a fellow awards front-runner, First Man didn’t have the ideal opening weekend take-off it was hoping for. The Ryan Gosling-led film debuted in third place a bit below expectations. Projected to open to $20 million, it instead earned $16.5 million. It’s by no means a disaster though; the biopic got a B+ CinemaScore from audiences and largely positive reviews from critics (though not this critic!).

Meanwhile, a black pile of alien goo topped the box office for the second weekend in a row. Following a surprising record-breaking opening, Sony’s Venom remained at number one with $35.7 million. The movie only had a 55.5 percent second-weekend drop, which is close to Logan‘s 56.7 percent dip, but even better than the last three Spider-Man movies, as Forbes notes. The Tom Hardy-led comic book movie continued to bring in impressive numbers overseas as well, remaining at the top of the international box office with $69.7 million. Who knew a movie as silly and ridiculous as Venom could make $378.1 million worldwide in two weeks?

It was also a great weekend for Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born. The romance only suffered a 38 percent dip in its second weekend, bringing in $28 million. Cooper’s directorial debut, which is the forth (technically fifth) version of a movie that’s over 80 years old, has made nearly $95 million in just 10 days, and $135.4 million worldwide. We are certainly far from the shallow now.

This weekend’s other new releases included Goosebumps 2 which landed just below First Man at $16.2 million. That’s lower than the first movie, which opened at $23.6 million in 2015, and even lower than this fall's other Jack Black kid-friendly Halloween movie, The House With a Clock In Its Walls. That family film topped the box office a few weeks ago with a $26.9 million debut. The other big new release was Drew Goddard’s Bad Times at the El Royale (which our own Matt Singer said, unfortunately, is a movie that lives up to its title). Despite a stacked cast included Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson, Chris Hemsworth, and John Hamm, Bad Times opened in seventh place with $7.2 million.

At the specialty box office, the Timothee Chalamet-led addiction drama Beautiful Boy had a solid limited opening, earning $221,437 in four theaters. The film is no Call Me By Your Name, but the film had one of the best per-theater-averages of the year with $55,359.

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