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MMA movies: Warrior flops at the box office

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By @rantmma

If we needed more proof that Fedor Emelianenko wasn’t a big box office draw, the film ‘Warrior’ has not been selling many tickets.  The story of 2 brothers fighting in an MMA tournament that features Kurt Angle (playing a fictional version of Fedor) as well as Nate Marquardt and Anthony Johnson received great reviews, but the popular reception as measured by ticket sales has been very weak.

MMA movies have been a mixed bag both critically and financially.  Never Back Down was a terrible movie that made money.  Redbelt is generally considered to be the best of the previous MMA movies, but lost money (this despite the presences of Randy Couture and various old and new school figures).  Fighting had average reviews and a decent box office run.

Unfortunately, a fair number of people in the MMA world were calling this movie the MMA equivalent of Rocky, or some equivalently similar epic sports film.  Ads were appearing on all the major MMA websites featuring the praise from critics.  This movie was supposed to demonstrate that MMA was becoming a sport that would be mentioned regularly alongside the baseballs and footballs of America.  Plus, if people routinely go to the theatre to watch ultraviolent films with no serious plot like Saw, they should enjoy people beating each other up right?  Evidently, this didn’t work out.  Week 2 saw Warrior’s receipts plunge nearly 50%, and the film is not going to make money.

At this point it’s worth remembering that these movies are a completely separate thing from the sport.  The success or failure of a movie is not necessarily an indicator of whether or not the sport of MMA is really moving toward the mainstream.  Instead, we should be looking at how the UFC does in its 1st event on Fox and whether or not ratings and PPV buys for the entire roster of events are trending upward.  The fact that a movie which had a fairly small release platform did not do that well at the box office should not take away from the fact that the UFC is the most successful PPV brand and is going to be putting events on network television.

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