And so The Rock took to social media this morning to thank his fans directly for making Black Adam the number one movie worldwide for the second weekend running.
The Rotten Tomatoes page for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s DC Comics superhero outing underscores an interesting dichotomy between what critics look for in a movie as opposed what the audience actually wants to pay twenty bucks a ticket to watch. With an RT “fresh rating” of 40% versus an “audience score” of 90%, it’s no surprise that the abuse Black Adam took from critics had no impact on the movie’s actual box office.
Black Adam — a spin-off of the hit film Shazam! and one of the few films to survive Warner Bros’ recent DCEU purge that took the nearly-completed Batgirl — is based on the DC Comics title of the same name and centers around the title character whose powers have been granted to him by the ancient Egyptian Gods.
Black Adam was supposed to appear as a villain in Shazam!, but higher-ups at DC Films decided to port the character directly into the lead role as an antihero in his own film. And the decision has paid off, as the movie retained its number one spot even as the box office for the film has dropped 59% since its first week, according to BoxOfficeMojo.
Despite a sluggish overall week for films, Black Adam crossed the $100 million line easily despite a post-pandemic Halloween season that is the worst the box office has seen since the late 1990s. This is a doubly impressive feat when one considers that, as The Rock points out, Black Adam isn’t the most popular title among any but the most ardent DC Comics fans.
