The Rock says he never thought about box office performance for ‘The Smashing Machine’
Image: A24
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson isn’t that concerned with the less-than-stellar box office performance of ‘The Smashing Machine’ and never was to begin with.
Speaking on a podcast for The Hollywood Reporter recorded for 500 film students at Chapman University, Johnson talked about why he wanted to do the movie and included a line about the box office performance for his biopic on former MMA/UFC fighter Mark Kerr based on the 2002 documentary of the same name.
“Smashing Machine also represents a turning point in my career that I’ve wanted for a long time. For the first time in my career…I made a film to challenge myself and to really rip myself open and to go elsewhere and disappear and transform and not one time did I think about box office,” he said.
Despite critical praise, the movie barely surpassed $20 million ($11.3 million domestic/$8.8 million international), the lowest-ever of any Johnson-led film.
He talked about how in Hollywood, the normal tendency is to be concerned about that and how sometimes, you wake up on a Saturday and feel good about things or sometimes you don’t. With this movie, “I had not thought about that at all.”
“And even that Friday night when we opened, I went to sleep peacefully and woke up peacefully because it represented this thing. And even though we didn’t do well (at the box office) or as well as we wanted to, it was okay because it just represented the thing I did for me,” he said, saying it did represent doing something he loves to do in telling stories and that the movie gave him an opportunity to have a place to put a lot of things he experienced growing up.
Johnson remains proud of the movie and that it completely changed my life in ways that I didn’t anticipate, because of what it represents. It represents, for me, listening to your gut, to your instinct, to that little voice. Sometimes in life, you think you’re capable of something, but you don’t quite know. And sometimes it takes people around you to go, ‘Come on, you could do this.’”
A streaming home and home availability date has not yet been announced.
Since 2011, Josh has been a contributing editor to Wrestling Observer/F4WOnline.com and also hosts the Punch-Out podcast. He has also written for Fight Magazine, Bloody Elbow, Bleacher Report, and other websites. He's a 2000 graduate of the University of Maine, worked in pro sports, and once was an indie ring announcer.