It’s true, I spent a lot of time thinking about Walk Hard before its release. I sat in on a Q&A with the actors immediately after I saw it, I reviewed the movie, I interviewed its three stars and its director. I probably gave more thought to this movie than anyone except John C. Reilly and his mom, and I staked a lot by being one of the first people to say online that it was really good.
So yeah, maybe I’m biased, but I’m completely shocked at the way Walk Hard has absolutely tanked at the box office. On its opening weekend it barely managed to make the top ten, coming in at #8, and as of today has made $12 million—you don’t even want me to tell you what a small fraction that is of Alvin and the Chipmunks total gross. For comparison’s sake, Juno made three times as much money over this past weekend on fewer than half as many screens; Walk Hard barely made more money than Atonement, which is on—for real—an eighth of the screens that the Dewey Cox story is on.
So what happened? The marketing campaign was insane, the reviews glowing, and we all figured Judd Apatow could videotape Paul Rudd playing fetch with a golden retriever and it would make $100 million, easily. They even had a brilliant marketing ploy in a series of concerts performed by Dewey Cox himself—I realize I spend an abnormal amount of time on the Internet, but there was serious web buzz about those.
The best I can figure is that Walk Hard simply had the misfortune of getting dumped into a super-crowded holiday season, with National Treasure 2 and I Am Legend continuing to suck up the teenage boy audience and Oscar bait luring the upscale audiences who unexpectedly loved Knocked Up and Superbad. There’s a certain group of people who would appreciate the film’s reference to the D.W. Pennebaker Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, and they were all seeing There Will Be Blood instead.
I don’t want to start threatening an Apatow backlash just yet, but maybe there’s some typecasting of Judd Apatow movies as being a summertime thing. We expect dick jokes and bad puns, and we love them, but usually when the weather is hot. The inexplicable success of Alvin and the Chipmunks is actually a little explicable, since during the holidays everyone is trapped with their families, and the multiplex is the best escape. I got my dad to watch Knocked Up a few days ago and he liked it, but I’m not sure even he’s ready for the gleeful full-frontal nudity of Walk Hard.
I’ve got my fingers crossed that Walk Hard can become a hit on DVD, or that at least a few people will download its soundtrack, since it’s really and truly worth a look. Poor Jake Kasdan, though. Apatow produced his film earlier this year, The TV Set, and it tanked too. I still resent his brother Jon Kasdan for making the disasterbacle In The Land of Women earlier this year, so I plan to stay on good terms with at least one Kasdan brother. Get it together, Jake and Judd; if The Pineapple Express is a flop when it comes out next summer, we might know there’s real trouble in the Land of Apatow.
