A hard lesson for A24's The Smashing Machine film
Big questions remain largely unanswered about The Rock's purpose.
Why did A24 create a remake of The Smashing Machine documentary, and who was the primary audience for this project?
Before we attempt to answer these key questions, I should highlight the unique experiment that A24 is attempting with combat sports and why it’s such a spectacular challenge.
Since the inception of Wrestling with Shadows and Beyond the Mat, this generation of fight fan isn’t interested in watching fictional movies about combat sports unless it’s a semi-shoot exposé like Mickey Rourke’s The Wrestler.
Today’s fan wants to, for lack of a better phrase, work themselves into a shoot. The powers-that-be have conditioned today’s fan to want a movie that promises to reveal how the magic is made.
People want to be told that the movie they are watching is a version of the truth, so they can create their own mental movie that they star in.
This is why everything in life now has some sort of conspiracy attached to it, from political assassinations to umpire calls in baseball games.
It’s why WWE Unreal exists on Netflix. It’s why UK YouTubers dominate combat sports content with their obsession with process over substance.
Call it the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 plague, a post-modern peanut gallery observational take. Newer fight fans are being conditioned to invest in fight-flavored derivatives that promise to satisfy a hunger and craving for mystery that largely is gone from today’s wrestling or MMA product.
A24 is swimming upstream by going against conventional wisdom, first with The Iron Claw and now with The Smashing Machine. They are fictionalizing and utilizing dramatic license, taking real-life events or documentaries and re-spinning them with a Hollywood theme.
Perhaps the concept was to attract some fight fans, but also attract casual fans or non-fans who might be interested in this kind of fight-flavored derivative.
The problem is that there isn’t a history of this kind of strategy appealing to mass audiences. To make it work, you have to have razor-sharp writing that breaks through and captures people’s hearts and minds.
Far be it from me to engage in self-promotion, but I actually speak from (a little) experience with this marketing phenomenon.
My friend and mentor for many decades, Sheldon Goldberg, has written multiple books about the fight business that reveal secrets through a (semi-)fictionalized lens.
Check out Sheldon Goldberg’s wrestling books on Amazon. The Last Fall is Yellowstone meets territory wrestling.
I’ve had the pleasure, along with the estimable Kenny Casanova, of reviewing Sheldon’s great books during his writing journey. And I’ve learned what customers want and don’t want.
The margin for error in fictionalizing fight drama is extraordinarily slim. If the creators don’t hit the bullseye, there is little or no market forgiveness — or interest.
Which brings us to A24’s version of The Smashing Machine and some of the stunning revelations that I had watching this two-hour movie. The latest numbers, according to Box Office Mojo, indicate a $10.2M-ish two-week haul in the U.S.
On the surface, it’s supposed to be a biopic, but by the end of the feature, I’m not sure what A24 really wanted it to be.
Benny Safdie scripting for ‘life’s losers’
I should have known better. As one of my best friends pointed out, A24’s version of Smashing Machine is what it is because a non-fight guy was remixing and repurposing a fight script from a previous generation.
Hollywood loves to value extract franchises to a crisp. Except for that to work, people need to feel good about the franchise continuing.
Some of the A24-flavored press heading into the opening of their version of Smashing Machine read like this:
CBC - Benny Safdie tells the inspiring story of a loser in The Smashing Machine
A Rabbit’s Foot (Substack) - Benny Safdie is still doing it for the losers
The Atlantic - The director who fell in love with losers
iHeart Radio - Benny Safdie tells the inspiring story of a loser
Take this background information and marry it to my intensely personal connection to the subject matter, and the sum total is a personal review not to be found anywhere else.