8 Things You Didn't Know About Ready To Rumble
5. The Film Made Half Of Its Budget
Ready to Rumble was a gigantic flop, whichever way you choose to look at it.
The film opened on April 7th, 2000 across a not inconsiderable 2,585 theatres at No.6 on the top 10 box-office charts, earning a rotten $5,257,778. That's an average of just $2,033 per theatre and is, in fact, the 43rd worst opening for a saturated film release ever.
The weekend after that the film fell to No.10 in the charts, earning a further $2,685,718, a drop of almost 50%. For its third week, the film was pulled from over a thousand theatres and grossed less than a million dollars.
It continued to fall week after week as it was pulled from more and more theatres. By the end of its seven-week run, it was playing in 219 theatres across the whole of the United States, amassing $57,010 in the process. Its total foreign gross was about that much, too.
All told, Ready to Rumble grossed $12,394,327 against an estimated $24m production budget. It didn't help WCW and it certainly didn't help distributor Warner Bros. It was the Atlanta-based company's biggest waste of money since hiring The Ultimate Warrior in the fall of '98.