The Jackie Robinson biopic, “42,” “overperformed,” according to Deadline.com, doing much better than expected and was the top grossing movie over the weekend with $27.3 million.
The impressive debut is a record for a baseball movie, topping the $19.5M debut of 2011′s Moneyball.
The film, which cost $38 million to produce, out-swung even the most ambitious expectations in the low-$20 millions, easily winning the weekend that included “Scary Movie 5,” which landed in the second position at $15.2 million, Variety reported.
Multiple scenes for the movie were shot throughout Georgia.
Exit polling showed the audience composition was males 48 percent females 52 percent; under age 25 was 17 percent, age 25 and up 83 percent, and the main reason for attending the movie was subject matter 84 percent. A Warner Bros exec told Deadline: “While we do not poll race breakdown, I can tell you we performed extremely well in all the large urban markets. But the highest grossing theaters were the country’s most commercial screens.”
Today is MLB’s Jackie Robinson Day where every player wears Robinson’s 42 and Deadline predicts that grosses for today could “stay level” because of the attention.
Thomas Tull, the movie’s producer, told Deadline that he relied on Robinson’s widow Rachel Robinson to help with the movie. “Her voice helped us with authenticity. That was the person who lived it,” Tull said. “And that was a really important story for us to tell.”
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