ROCK OF AGES SHAT THE BED
All of the evidence suggested that Rock of Ages, the cinematic adaptation of the smash Broadway jukebox musical, was going to suck big hairy Gene Hoglan balls. So I naturally assumed it was going to be a massive hit, because let’s be real — most box-office successes these days are horrible fucking movies.
But — eureka! — sometimes humanity makes a small effort to earn back some of my faith. And in this case, humanity did so by ignoring this idiotic movie. From Deadline:
“New Line/Warner Bros’ Rock Of Ages (3,470 theaters) fell to earth with a thud… The PG-13 musical is looking to open to only $15M this weekend after taking in just $5.3M Friday and $5.4M Saturday… it did worse than the studio expected… Warner Bros was holding out hope… that a good CinemaScore [the way studios track how much viewers enjoyed a film] could generate great word of mouth and therefore great legs for the film. It didn’t materialize: audiences only gave Rock Of Ages a mediocre ‘B’. There’s just no way to save this s(t)inker…”
As of this writing, the movie did gross about fifteen million dollars according to Box Office Mojo. And while fifteen million dollars may sound like a lot of money, keep in mind that the movie cost $75 million to produce BEFORE you include the promotional budget (which was probably close to, or greater than, the budget of the film itself), and that it has an all-star cast, including Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin, Russell Brand, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. So a fifteen million dollar opening weekend is, in fact, disgraceful. And with it being summer, there’s going to be lots of competition at the box office in the coming weeks — including a new Pixar movie and the latest entries in the Batman and Spider-Man franchises — meaning the chances of it gaining steam are slim to none. So this thing is pretty much dead.
The even better news — besides audiences showing some class, I mean — is that this should discourage Hollywood from making any further hair metal-based musicals or even biopics for the time being. So if you were worried about a horrible movie version of The Dirt starring Taylor Lautner as Nikki Sixx and AnnaLynne McCord as Vince Neil or whatever, you can rest easy… for now.
-AR
