Man, oh man, talk about heartbreak: In one of the bigger upsets at the box office this year, The Rock’s family comedy The Game Plan finished in first place for a second consecutive weekend after Ben Stiller’s R-rated remake The Heartbreak Kid (No. 2) tanked. According to Sunday’s estimates, The Game Plan earned an impressive $16.3 mil on a mere 29 percent decline, while The Heartbreak Kid brought in just $14 mil — nearly half as much as most prognosticators predicted.

So let’s take a moment to look at what went right and what went wrong. Certainly, The Rock’s movie is a crowd-pleaser: It earned a solid A CinemaScore review from audiences and has been holding on strong (it’s 10-day cumulative gross is a healthy $42.8 mil), especially on the weekends, when kids are out of school. It’s a sweet film that families have identified as a safe option at a multiplex filled with grown-up fare, and Disney’s distribution wizards deserve major props for finding this sweet spot on the crowded release calendar in which their movie has been able to thrive.

But I’d also argue that The Game Plan doesn’t deserve much more credit than that — the wave that it’s riding has been able to roll along smoothly thanks to the failure of the other major movies in its path to catch any momentum. In the case of Stiller’s comedy, its drowning comes down to a combination of its restrictive rating; weak reviews; bad word of mouth (the film got an utterly deadly C- mark in the CinemaScore survey); and the fact that, every now and then, even movies featuring the most popular stars bomb.

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