Jackie Robinson & Branch Rickey are box-office stars
The rousing baseball biopic 42, from Warners and Legendary, scored at the weekend box office, batting in an estimated $27.3 million at the North American box office.
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Financed by Legendary, whose CEO Thomas Tull personally produced the $40 million project, the PG-13-rated 42 recounts the career of Jackie Robinson. The film was written and directed by Brian Helgeland (A Knight’s Tale), and stars Chadwick Boseman as Robinson and Harrison Ford as the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey. With an excellent A-plus CinemaScore from all four quadrants of the audience, it was embraced by moviegoers as it outperformed expectations, which had the movie opening in the mid-to-high-teen millions.
I’m presenting this as a news story, because it’s a news story. I don’t mean to editorialize. I do mean to point out that the No. 1 film in America, by quite a lot, features woolen baseball uniforms and digital recreations of Forbes Field and the Polo Grounds.
And if that doesn’t make you smile, at least for a moment, I don’t know you any more.
