"You can't control box office results": Dwayne Johnson defends The Smashing Machine's rather disappointing debut

Dwayne Johnson has responded to the underwhelming box office performance of The Smashing Machine. Released on October 3, 2025, this latest film barely scraped together $6 million in its first weekend.

This marks the lowest debut for a star who usually shatters records through summer blockbusters. The Rock playing a legit MMA legend like Mark Kerr was expected to mint more than what it did, but it ended up in third place, falling behind One Battle After Another and others.

Additionally, with a reportedly $50 million production budget, all the glitzy festival appearances and the marketing blitz, the numbers start to look even rougher.

However, Johnson took to social media to highlight the distinction between creative work and disappointing digits on a spreadsheet. He wrote:

“From deep in my grateful bones, thank you to everyone who has watched 'The Smashing Machine'. In our storytelling world, you can’t control box office results — but what I realized you can control is your performance, and your commitment to completely disappear and go elsewhere. And I will always run to that opportunity.”

Dwayne Johnson defends the disappointing debut of The Smashing Machine

Dwayne Johnson took to Instagram after The Smashing Machine didn’t do well at the box office. After expressing his gratitude, he acknowledged that box office numbers cannot be controlled but he can control his performance. The opportunity to work on his art is something he always looks forward to.

Johnson also shared about his role and the director:

“It was my honor to transform in this role for my director Benny Safdie @bowedtie [sic]. Thank you brother for believing in me. Truth is this film has changed my life. With deep gratitude, respect and radical empathy.”

The Smashing Machine’s box office flop wasn’t just a little stumble. This was supposed to be a sure thing. Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, seldom misses. And with Safdie at the helm (the Uncut Gems mastermind) and Emily Blunt in the mix, people expected a record-breaker. Instead, it made barely $6 million.

Just to put the numbers under a magnifying glass: $6,000,171, spread out over 3,345 theaters in the U.S. (via Box Office Mojo). That’s Dwayne Johnson’s lowest wide-release debut ever. If you want to look at the worldwide picture, the global total after weekend one is $6,110,420. Nearly all of it came from the U.S. and Canada. The rest, around $110k, trickled in from places like New Zealand, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

A24 handled distribution, but even their Midas touch couldn’t save this one, as it only managed to debut in third place at the North American box office. It fell behind Taylor Swift’s Official Release Party of a Showgirl, which raked in $33 million. Second place went to One Battle After Another with $11 million.

With a production budget somewhere in the $40–50 million neighborhood, these early numbers are not even on the same map.

So, why did this happen? There’s plenty of finger-pointing going around. First off, the R rating. That probably chopped off a whole chunk of Johnson’s built-in crowd, families, and people looking for some lighthearted fun. Add in some word-of-mouth and the fact that it had to go up against Taylor Swift, and we had a box office tumble.

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The Smashing Machine is a non-fiction account of Mark Kerr, a trailblazer in the history of mixed martial arts and the early UFC. The story is set in the late 1990s and early 2000s, during which Kerr was in his prime of career, yet engaged in severe backroom struggles with addiction and personal demons.

Written and directed by Benny Safdie, the script explores the complexity of Kerr, especially with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), and his addiction to painkillers.

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