Why Didn't Anyone Smell What The Rock Was Cooking?

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Dwayne Johnson famously used to call himself “franchise Viagra”—which, for a guy who already has “Rock” and “Johnson” in his name, borders on an unhealthy obsession—thanks to his ability to parachute into franchises like GI Joe and Fast & Furious and immediately generate tumescent returns.

And so putting The Rock in a Safdie brother movie (Benny’s first solo effort) seemed like a win-win: the indie cachet of a burgeoning name director like Safdie, with the box office juice of The Rock, all packaged by the presumed masters of memes and tastemaking, A24. After its premiere in Venice, where The Smashing Machine won a Golden Lion and a 15-minute standing ovation (do not ask me how this works, I have never understood it), industry rags like Variety were calling Johnson an early Oscar contender, even before the official release. While the buzz on Johnson’s (great) performance hasn’t really wavered, coverage of The Smashing Machine has become a contest for the best combat sports pun.

Three weeks ago, analysts for the $50m budgeted movie were predicting a $20 million opening.

In early September, “The Smashing Machine” was tracking a debut of $17 million, a decent figure in no small part because of Johnson’s broad appeal. Heading into opening weekend, however, projections dropped to $15 million with some anticipating a start as low as $8 million. Even that was too lofty. On Saturday, estimates were lowered again to $6.5 million and revised again on Sunday to $6 million. Rival studios think the three-day figure will be softer (closer to $5.5 million) by the time the number is finalized on Monday. [Variety, over the weekend]

The actual opening? $5.8 million, “the worst of The Rock’s career,” few headlines failed to note.

While $5.8 million still makes The Smashine Machine above average for an A24 movie (ahead of Eddington’s $4.4 million, behind The Materialists’ $11m) obviously that’s much too small an opening for a big Johnson like The Rock.

Potential explanations for this abound, from the last-minute release of Taylor Swift’s The Official Release Party of a Showgirl grossing $34 million and sucking up all the oxygen (is that a movie? I still don’t understand1) to tepid word of mouth (a B- Cinemascore) to the public’s general lack of appetite for “wrestling movies,” as Deadline put it. (As an MMA fan, how dare you).

Reality check: There’s a very low ceiling on wrestling movies at the box office and arguably always has been, outside Jared Hess’ 2006 Nacho Libre, which opened post the director’s fanfare for Napoleon Dynamite, back when Jack Black original comedies could debut to $28.3M and end their domestic run at $80M.

Look back at the grosses of wrestling movies, and Smashing Machine‘s actually seems above average, i.e. A24’s 2023 Iron Claw ($4.8M 3-day, $35M domestic), Darren Aronofsky’s 2x Oscar nominated The Wrestler (its highest grossing weekend at $3.7M was its 6th with a $26.2M final domestic in 2008) and Bennett Miller’s 2014 Foxcatcher ($1M in its widest break, final of $12M). Heck, even the Robert Aldrich directed, Peter Falk starring 1981 nudie comedy, …All the Marbles, about female-wrestling fell outside the ring with $6.1M domestic. [Deadline]

Not a bad analysis, even if it ignores the fact that The Smashing Machine isn’t about wrestling. The write-up itself does speak to how little the general public still knows or cares about MMA, which still surprises even me, especially given how much time I put into writing a retrospective about the original documentary upon which A24’s movie was based. This is a sport that the president has promised to stage on the White House lawn!

UFC CEO Dana White was a definite proponent of Smashing Machine and embraced it early with several screenings for UFC tastemakers [editor’s note: uh… what?] as well as signed-off integrations. Fans of the sport at 279 million strong around the globe didn’t come out. Why? Again, word of mouth, but also, they’re a homebound demo, shelling high priced money to watch fights in their living room. Smashing Machine is the type of movie they’re bound to catch on their couch. [Deadline]

Damn, that’s a lot of presumption about MMA fans from the guy who just called The Smashing Machine “a wrestling movie.” That doesn’t mean he’s wrong, but perhaps there’s some poetic justice to Dana White getting some egg on his face over the release given how he and Zuffa tried so hard to scrub any mention of the original Smashing Machine doc from the MMA blogs back in the day (allegedly! listen to the Hyams interview!).

One Battle After Another still doing big business in its second weekend was also probably a factor in Smashing Machine’s poor opening, tugging away big hunks of the “fans of movies aimed at adults” crowd. Deadline also notes that OBAA (which opened to $22 million, and the trades still bagged on it) outspent The Smashing Machine many times over on marketing. With no shade to Safdie and The Rock (anyone who loves Mark Kerr and the original doc as much as I do is cool by me), The Smashing Machine just isn’t the feel-good, you-gotta-see-this romp that One Battle After Another is. And even though it’s a little early to tell, even Deadline notes that this will only probably end up costing A24 a relatively piddling $10-15 million.

Still, how do we reckon with the fact that this supposed box office titan just had his worst opening for what most people are calling his best performance? The dude has 392 million Instagram followers! My preferred explanation is that Americans actually hate art more than they love pro wrestling. The Rock in an arthouse movie? Nuh uh. The Rock promoting a big soda? Now we’re talking.

The truth probably involves a combination of factors, like The Rock’s star having dimmed from overexposure, and the general atmosphere of advertising having less power than ever. Even on its best day, as the screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote, “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work.”

That’s probably even truer now than in 1983 when he wrote it, after a generation of tech grifters and shortsighted MBAs esssentially broke advertising completely some time in the mid 20-teens. Sometimes you think you have a movie that checks all the boxes and whose appeal crosses demographics, when what you really have is more like a ‘tweener—a movie that potentially appeals to a lot of demo but isn’t quite important enough to any one to break through.

Part of me had hoped that with such a great run of movies this year—Sinners, Weapons, Friendship, Caught Stealing, One Battle After Another, and awards season has only barely begun—that OBAA/The Smashing Machine would do Barbenheimer numbers. People do seem to be trickling back to theaters, but maybe they’re not quite there yet. Hopefully they’ll keep coming back (I have!), and distributors learn that maybe it’s worth losing a few bucks on a good-faith effort like The Smashing Machine if it gets people back in the habit of going to movies.

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