Down

First Man

A $16 million opening weekend isn’t fatal for a film that was projected to open in the $18–$20 million range. (Universal will happily remind you it’s in the same neighborhood of Argo’s debut.) But a week of “Why First Man Failed to Blast Off” headlines is not the sort of thing you want to deal with if you’re trying to position your movie as an Oscar front-runner. Going into the season, it was looking like everyone else might have had to play catch-up to Star Is Born and First Man; now it feels like Star alone is leading the pack.