Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is not losing any sleep over The Smashing Machine’s underwhelming box office returns, and according to him, he never planned to.

Appearing on The Hollywood Reporter’s podcast in front of 500 film students at Chapman University, Johnson reflected on why the biopic about former MMA and UFC fighter Mark Kerr meant so much to him, regardless of numbers.

“Smashing Machine also represents a turning point in my career that I’ve wanted for a long time. For the first time in my career…I made a film to challenge myself and to really rip myself open and to go elsewhere and disappear and transform and not one time did I think about box office,” he said.

Despite strong reviews, the film earned just over $20 million worldwide ($11.3 million domestic and $8.8 million international), the lowest total of any Johnson-led project. But that did not shake his peace of mind.

“In Hollywood, the normal tendency is to be concerned about that,” he explained. “Sometimes you wake up on a Saturday and feel good, sometimes you don’t. With this movie, I had not thought about that at all. Even that Friday night when we opened, I went to sleep peacefully and woke up peacefully because it represented this thing. And even though we didn’t do well or as well as we wanted to, it was okay because it just represented the thing I did for me.”

Johnson added that The Smashing Machine changed his life in unexpected ways. “It represents, for me, listening to your gut, to your instinct, to that little voice. Sometimes in life, you think you’re capable of something, but you don’t quite know. And sometimes it takes people around you to go, ‘Come on, you could do this.’”

The film has yet to receive an official streaming release date.

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