Dwayne Johnson on ‘The Smashing Machine’ Opening Week
I’m seeing all over social media that Bennie Safdie’s solo film The Smashing Machine is The Rock’s lowest grossing film to date. This is how he responded:
“In our storytelling world, you can’t control box office results — but what I realized you can control is your performance, your commitment to disappear & go elsewhere”
Even from the trailer you can tell this is his best performance of his career. Yet how much of general moviegoers will want to watch a biopic of an MMA fighter. It’s a very niche movie that will attracts sports movie enthusiasts as well as fans of the Safdie brothers.
You would think there is a direct relationship of great art or performance with increase in sales. But many times it’s never the case.
For both creative and non-creative fields, many people put in so many hours studying or creating, feeling likes it’s their best work ever created and when they share it with the world it gets very little engagement.
I seen some of my artist friends on instagram post their progress of something they’ve been working on for several days and when they post the final result, it’s less than twenty likes. Or only three people open up your newsletter.
Our best work, what we feel like is our best work, might not necessarily be felt by your audience due to many factors. But just remember there are complex algorithms going on in these popular social media sites that aren’t promoting your posts to your followers that efficiently. Such as instagram, where you almost get penalized for posting non-video based content.
Also remember that the people that follow you also follow hundreds of other people and all those people are also fighting to get 3-5 seconds of their posts to get onto the small screens of their followers as well.
There’s also timing of when you post. I don’t think this really applies to Instagram anymore cause the algorithm is so messed up. But I know at least on Flickr posting in the morning I get the most engagement with my photos compared to when I post in the evening after work (Flickr has no algorithm btw).
It’s many factors. Your best work won’t guarantee increase of sales or your views or subscriber count to suddenly blow up.
Keep producing your best work and don’t think about the engagement too much that might come with it. There is a luck factor to all of this so producing your best work will increase the chances of getting seen more. But the more important part is your consistency to just keep producing something everyday. The more you go out to authentically create, post, tweet, update your website and engage with your audience your personal brand will grow exponentially in the long run.
Don’t worry about the reception of one piece of your work. I’ve had photos that I personally feel are the best photographs I’ve ever taken that I can’t replicate and they have the lowest view counts. At the time it stung cause you were waiting for all the digital pat on the backs and a blow up of comments but it was none of that. I didn’t think to much about it and didn’t care cause I enjoy photography and the act of taking photos more than seeing what people think about them.
The same way The Rock doesn’t seem to care too much how his recent performance did, he’s going to move on and work on something else. Maybe someday The Smashing Machine will get the credit that it deserves that’s still too early to appreciate.