Weekend Box Office: Did The Cobbler actually come out in theaters?
This might sound like a funny question, but did The Cobbler—a movie The A.V. Club reviewed this week, starring the profitable Adam Sandler and directed and co-written by the generally well-liked Thomas McCarthy—actually come out in theaters?
Ray Subers of Box Office Mojo, this report’s usual source for weekend figures, doesn’t seem to think so; the movie doesn’t even have an entry on his site. Some have reported that the widely panned comic fantasy’s distributor cancelled the theatrical release at the last minute, opting to go straight to VOD, while others are claiming that it opened in between 17 and 20 theaters and made about $24,000, forcing this writer to fact-check this story the only way a modern journalist knows how: by searching Twitter.
The biggest challenge with this approach is that nearly every tweet about The Cobbler either comes from film critics, who had to see The Cobbler out of professional obligation, or from the co-writer of The Cobbler, who apparently spent all week glued to the Twitter search bar. With enough sifting, though, it was possible to find as many as half a dozen regular, ordinary people who had seen the film.