Week four of The Blind Side.
This summer was stacked. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came in like a freight train and had already pulled in $200 million. High School Musical 2 went head-to-head with it on the teen crowd, so it didn't blow the doors off, but $90 million and climbing was still nothing to sneeze at.
Disney's big swing to bring back 2D animation, The Princess and the Frog, face-planted hard. No saving that one.
But then, quietly wedged between all these teen juggernauts, a little sports movie about heart, grit, and baseball started eating everyone's lunch.
In its fourth week, The Blind Side had clawed its way to $140 million. That's right—$140 million—while getting sandwiched by every YA blockbuster in existence. Miracle? Yeah, pretty much.
It opened the same weekend as Harry Potter (which dropped a ridiculous $130 million opening), and somehow The Blind Side still out-legged it in week four and stole the #1 spot on the chart.
Absolute madness.
Inside the newly re-designed offices of Variety, the editors were losing their minds in the best way.
"No way we saw this coming. It opened soft as hell and then just… refused to die."
That's the thing about movies like The Blind Side: they're grinders. Not the three-day $100-million+ monsters like Potter or Twilight. They're the ones that hover in the top three for weeks, legs for days, and sometimes even climb higher when everything else is dropping.
Word-of-mouth rockets. Families drag friends. Dads who never cry start tearing up in the parking lot. Classic sleeper hit.
One editor cracked sunflower seeds and shrugged. "Baseball's the second-most-watched sport in America. MLB finals still smoke the NBA in ratings some years. We just got blinded by the summer tentpole hype."
Another jumped in: "Also genius scheduling. Yeah, it shared a weekend with Harry Potter, but the audiences barely overlap. Teen witches versus grown men who love baseball and feel-good stories? No crossover. They just peacefully split the box office."
"And let's be real," someone else laughed, "Joey Grant plus Will Smith? That combo prints money."
They slapped all of it into the new issue:
THE BIGGEST STEALTH BOMB HIDING UNDER HARRY POTTER'S NOSE
THE BLIND SIDE HITS $140M IN FOUR WEEKS—JOEY'S MAGIC STILL WORKS!
Every outlet followed suit—The Hollywood Reporter, Rotten Tomatoes, you name it—all running headlines about the little baseball movie that could.
Of course, the haters crawled out of the woodwork.
Jack Hall over at MovieReview.com called it "fake, hollow, peak American hero-worship slop."
Comment sections chimed in:
"Worse than a bad movie—wastes your time pretending to have a soul."
But the noise got drowned out fast.
Respected critics who usually hate everything feel-good actually showed up with nuance:
"Look, you can roll your eyes at the corniness all you want, but this really happened. And it's about who you decide to become."
Or straight fire:
"I left the theater ready to run through a wall. That's the power of sports done right—competition, glory, breaking barriers."
Black audiences especially connected hard. One guy told a CAA street-interview crew: "When they win the championship and all those arms go up—Black arms, white arms, all celebrating together? Man, that hit me right here." (He thumped his chest.)
Dudes across America—guys who used to call Joey "the rom-com girl"—were flooding IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes:
"Joey, you officially own me. You're not just chick flicks anymore."
"You made every guy in North America tear up and cheer. We're yours."
Two more weeks later?
Harry Potter was sitting pretty at $270 million domestic… and The Blind Side?
$280 million.
It passed the damn Harry Potter movie.
This wasn't a dark horse anymore. This was a full-blown miracle.
IMDb: 17,033 votes, 8.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 88% critics, 89% audience
Variety rushed out an emergency extra edition. Cover: Will Smith, drenched in sweat, eyes burning with defiance.
Headline screaming across the top:
THE BLIND SIDE JUST EXPLODED
Inside, huge bold text:
THE BRIGHTEST HIT OF THE SUMMER
EVERY OTHER BLOCKBUSTER JUST GOT SCHOOLED
INSTANT INSPIRATIONAL CLASSIC