The sports drama has earned a fair amount of critical acclaim (higher than Onward, actually, with an 87 percent Rotten Tomatoes score), but there apparently wasn’t enough public interest to get people to swarm theaters buying tickets.
While the numbers aren’t all that great, there was very little chance that Onward wasn’t going to be called the “biggest movie in America” by the end of this weekend… but still there was some hope that Gavin O’Connor’s The Way Back starring Ben Affleck would make a bigger splash than it did.
At the very least it can be said that it did better than O’Conner’s last feature about athletics, as the MMA-centric Warrior only made $5.2 million during its first three days of release back in September 2011; but it made less than half of what O’Connor’s Miracle made in February 2004.as the story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team grossed $19.4 million in its opening.