Dwayne Johnson incredibly unsuccessful flop: “I lived the curse, I experienced it”
The movie career of Dwayne Johnson has a three-act structure to rival any blockbuster. In the early days of transition from the wrestling ring to the big screen, he starred in mostly obscure, most terrible medium-budget action romps and comedies. Then, just as he was seemingly doomed to bargain bin fodder, he hit the jackpot with Fast Five. This kicked off an insane run of box office success, helming franchises like the aforementioned Fast and Furious, G.I. Joe, and Jumanji. These days, he finds himself in a bit of a slump, having recently decided to have a crack at ‘serious’ acting with Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine. Will this successful launch phase four? Only time will tell.
Back in the early days of his acting work, few would have accepted that he’d one day become the highest-paid star in Hollywood. Aside from making an obscene amount of cash for his first starring role in The Scorpion King, things just didn’t seem to ever go his way. He filled his filmography with bombs like Southland Tales and embarrassments like Tooth Fairy. However, in a way, one of these flops was years ahead of its time.
In 2005, Johnson was part of the ensemble cast for Doom, a sci-fi action flick based on the incredibly popular video game of the same name. Alongside Karl Urban and Rosamund Pike, the People’s Champion blasted his way through demons in a movie that was mostly dross, with the exception of an insane first-person sequence straight out of the game itself. This was long before Hollywood started taking video game adaptations seriously. Just imagine what a Johnson-led ‘Doom’ movie could have done if they’d waited a decade or so.
The muscular megastar spoke to Total Film about his experiences on Doom and how they informed him while making another movie based on a video game, 2018’s Rampage. “I lived the video game curse,” he explained. “Doom was a movie based off a very popular video game and was incredibly unsuccessful. So I lived the curse, and I experienced it.” Despite the prevalence of its source material, the film failed to recoup its budget.
In contrast, Rampage, which is based on a much more obscure game, raked in the best part of half a billion dollars. At its peak, it was the second-highest movie based on a video game of all time, sitting just behind Warcraft. Even now, it’s still firmly within the top ten.
It’s not like Rampage, the story of a gorilla that grows to enormous size after inhaling a dangerous pathogen, is a masterpiece. As video games themselves have transitioned from a niche interest to a mainstream form of entertainment, both the public and the people who run movie studios have taken them more seriously. Mario and Sonic both have massively successful movies under their belts, while TV shows like The Last of Us and Fallout are scooping awards left, right, and centre. The idea of anything based on a game winning multiple Emmys would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.
Very few people would return to a genre that had almost killed their career, but Johnson is no ordinary man. He laid the smackdown on video game movies’ candy asses, walking away with millions of dollars in the process.
