The Rock comments on his film The Smashing Machine not performing well at the box office

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s film “The Smashing Machine” ended its theatrical run, earning a reported $20.2 million worldwide ($11.4 million domestic, $8.9 million international) against a $50 million budget. Dave Meltzer of F4WOnline.com noted that with theaters taking about half the revenue, the film is roughly $40 million in the red although streaming and TV rights will offset some losses.

While speaking to HollywoodReporter.com, Johnson stated the following about the movie’s box office performance…

“Smashing Machine 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.’ 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 — 20 plus years since The Scorpion King came out — 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.”

“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. Maybe it was because I was an only child, but all the stuff that I had experienced as a kid and as a teenager — eviction, my mom tried to take her life two months after we got evicted and I pulled her out of the middle of the highway, a whole bunch of stuff happened — I had rejected exploring any of that on film. For years I would do these other films that were big and fun, Jumanji and Moana, with a happy ending, and I love that still. But what this represented was, ‘Oh wait, I can do the thing I love, which is to tell stories, but I could also take all this stuff and have a place to put it.’”