Weekend Box Office: Real Steel not too dumb to triumph
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” goes the famous H.L. Mencken quote, and while the first-place performance of the robot boxing movie Real Steel supports that wisdom to a degree, the actual number reflects a little resistance. At $27.3 million, Real Steel easily topped the $10.4 million earned by George Clooney’s political drama The Ides Of March, but the “Oh, come now, that’s too much” factor may have kept it from the stratosphere, despite the film itself being guiltily enjoyable lizard-brain entertainment. Still, it earned an “A” CinemaScore—the most dubious of dubious metrics, but an indication that the movie is working for people and may have legs. The Ides Of March needed far more critical support than it received to have any chance in a market traditionally wary of political films of any stripe; after premiering to kind-but-unspectacular reviews at Venice and Toronto, and benefitting from little of the all-important Oscar “buzz,” it was more or less dead in the water.