After dubbing himself as “Franchise Viagra” more than a decade ago, Dwayne Johnson more than lived up to such rock hard billing when he helped steer the Journey, G.I. Joe, Fast & Furious, and Jumanji brands to their biggest box office totals yet after coming aboard, but things didn’t go so well when he tried to launch one of his own with Black Adam.
There’s plenty of second-hand embarrassment to be derived from thinking about the press tour for the DCU blockbuster, where Johnson and his cohorts at Seven Bucks were talking up sequels, spinoffs, and crossovers aplenty, with the leading man and producer seeking to carve out his own corner of the mythology that seemed to exist for the sole purpose of pitting him opposite Henry Cavill’s Superman.
Of course, those plans have been burned to the ground, stamped out, and tossed into the trash after James Gunn and Peter Safran decided they didn’t need the world’s highest-paid star to revamp the flagging comic book universe, leaving The Rock with egg all over his face as a result.
While he hasn’t done a great deal of public reflection on the failure of Black Adam, the 50 year-old did find himself in a contemplative mood when asked by Variety on the Oscars red carpet for this thoughts on the one-and-done DC dud.
“You know, all that I could do, and that we could do, when we were making Black Adam was to put our best foot forward, surround ourselves with the best people, and also, to deliver the best movie we could. The audience score was in the 90s. Critics took a couple of shots. That’s just the business of it, though.”
Audiences may have given it their approval on Rotten Tomatoes, but seeing as Black Adam failed to even reach $400 million at the global box office despite its status as the debut of an A-list megastar in cinema’s most consistently lucrative genre, not enough people were sufficiently won over to ensure the Man in Black’s debut proved so successful that the new co-CEOs were left with no other option but to keep him around.
