The director Dwayne Johnson called the second coming of Steven Spielberg: “There is ambition there”
While a man of his stature may not be willing to admit it, I can’t help but feel like Dwayne Johnson felt a little pang of disappointment that his turn in The Smashing Machine didn’t earn him an Oscar nod.
25 years after Johnson’s pivot into acting, which saw ‘The Brahma Bull’ inject some of his wrestling charisma into The Mummy, he was now a bona fide actor, turning in performances that hinged on more than just his full-throttled masculinity; at last, he had artistic kudos.
But for a while, it seemed as though he wasn’t that bothered about it all. Johnson had carved out a pretty lucrative niche that ultimately made him the highest-grossing actor in 2024 with a cool $88million landing in his pocket, and he got there starring in a string of, largely IP-based, blockbusters that served little to no artistic purpose.
Jumanji, The Fast Franchise, and Rampage serve as the most notable examples of this career model, which all built off of monster action sequences that were tailor-made for the ex-combat athletes, but every time one of these action behemoths was released, it felt as though there was a knowing wink shared between Johnson and us, the audience. We knew these films weren’t The Smashing Machine, and in turn, we assumed he did also, such that, for all intents and purposes, that was a transactional relationship designed solely to make money. Yet, when it came to Rampage in particular, something about its diversion from an IP-based storyline inspired Johnson to make some relatively lofty statements about its director, Brad Peyton.
Johnson said, “I like working with Brad. This is my third movie with him. There is ambition there. He’s a very ambitious director. I enjoy working with him creatively as well. I come from a world of sports at a very early age, and I enjoy being coached, and I enjoy being pushed, and not a lot of directors are comfortable in that space.”
He continued, “He loves movies that make people feel good, and I like that too. We’re very similar in our DNA because I feel we invest so much time in these movies, and as you know, movie-making is hard, takes many, many months, and then months of post, and then promote it like we’re doing now, it’s a long time.”
Okay, this tracks Johnson, we are with you so far, but where on the spectrum does Peyton actually sit? As an actor who’s worked with the director just as much as he’s worked with Vince McMahon, it’s difficult to discern whether Johnson sees him as an artist or businessman; but then, the actor called in the filmography of Hollywood’s favourite son as a means of truly highlighting what sort of director he is.
He claimed, “He’s influenced by those kinds of movies [Spielberg], and I like that. I like that about anybody who is in our business, specifically a director. We want to make this movie fun for the audience and literally want to make sure that they’re walking out floating in some way, feeling great about what they just saw.”
Perhaps the shared love of big set sequences has blurred the line for Johnson, or maybe he was simply high off the supply of Rampage’s promotional run and made a comparison that simply doesn’t hold.
