Sony continued to defy expectations, as Venom posted an impressive second weekend hold, down just 55% with $35.7 million in its second frame. Meanwhile, A Star is Born also showed impressive holding power, while the trio of newcomers were various levels of disappointing.

Venom has amassed $142 million after ten days of release, an impressive tally that many thought it wouldn’t be able to achieve across its entire run. Barring anything extremely unusual, it should be able to cross $200 million domestically without a hitch, as it approaches $400 million worldwide in record time.

While Venom may be the weekend champion, A Star is Born was no slouch in second, dipping just 35% with an excellent second weekend of $28 million. Within the next few days, Warner’s music drama will blow past $100 million. With Halloween serving as a closer competitor to Venom than A Star is Born, don’t be surprised if A Star manages to rank above Venom next weekend. In fairness, however, ranking isn’t terribly important when both films are doing so well.

Moving into third, First Man was a failure to launch for Universal, as the Neil Armstrong biopic turned up a weak $16.5 million in its opening. The picture was just $275K above Goosebumps 2, which has to be rather sobering for Universal. On top of that, First Man was bolstered by IMAX tickets, meaning it likely sold far fewer tickets. While comparisons to films like The Martian and Gravity were never quite accurate, the comparison to Sully is rather damning; the airplane drama made more than twice this in its opening, before legging it out well over $100 million.

So why did nobody show up for First Man? Well, a nearly two and a half hour drama is somewhat of a tough sell, especially when the trailers made it seem as though much of the runtime would be spent in the Armstrong’s home and NASA control rooms. These kinds of adult oriented dramas tend to hold rather well, but even a 4x multiplier barely gets it past $60 million, which is roughly how much it cost to make. Unless foreign audiences really show up en masse, this will be a big write-off for Universal.

The biggest loser of the weekend was Fox’s Bad Times at The El Royale, which saw far more vacancies than expected with just $7.2 million. This debut is roughly half of what writer-director Drew Goddard’s last project, The Cabin in the Woods, opened with in 2012. While the initial trailer certainly caught some interest, Fox was unable to maintain the hype as attention was funneled towards other films like A Star is Born and Venom. Between the weak B- Cinemascore and 6% dip on Saturday, it will likely get annihilated by Halloween this coming weekend. The El Royale will likely close its doors for good with less than $20 million in the bank.

The final major opener of the weekend was Sony’s family sequel Goosebumps 2, which, as expected, saw a rather steep drop-off from its predecessor. The sequel was produced for just $35 million (compared to the originals $84 million) and lacked its main star Jack Black. Still, the fact that it managed to open to $16 million is definitely a minor win for Sony, especially since this seems like the kind of family film that will clean up on home video.

GVN had their second wide release in a row, this time in the form of Gosnell, which opened in 673 locations to a rather unimpressive $1.2 million. This was, admittedly, better than last weekends Shine, which also opened in over 600 locations but failed spectacularly with just $205K.

Moving into the specialty market, one big opener received most of the attention; Amazon’s drama Beautiful Boy opened in four locations with an excellent $55K per theater average, one of the best of the year. This is especially impressive considering it has a rather unimpressive 64% on Rotten Tomatoes, as most of the films to do huge business in NY/LA releases such as this tend to be universally acclaimed.