Dwayne Johnson is no stranger to sci-fi, having tackled a number of different roles in almost every imaginable twist on the genre, and the results have been unsurprisingly inconsistent. After first dipping his toes into the water when he was still a full-time professional wrestler in a 2000 episode of Star Trek: Voyager, his next foray into sci-fi couldn’t have gone much worse.
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales was a bizarre abomination that reeked of intentionally abstract self-indulgence and rode a wave of critical apathy to a box office total of less than $375,000. From there, Johnson has revisited the genre in the form of tedious video game adaptation Doom, the bland and forgettable Race to Witch Mountain remake, completely ignored animation Planet 51 and the surprisingly entertaining Journey 2: The Mysterious Island.
If anything, the 48 year-old’s best sci-fi works barely even count as sci-fi at all, if you take Rampage at face value as a ludicrous monster movie and embrace G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Hobbs & Shaw as the preposterous and yet undeniably enjoyable heightened reality actioners that they are. Now, however, insider Daniel Richtman is claiming that the world’s highest-paid actor is being eyed for a role in the genre’s single biggest franchise.
According to the tipster, Johnson is under consideration for an unnamed Star Wars project, which certainly creates mixed emotions. After all, there would be something incredibly distracting about seeing an established screen persona like him show up in a galaxy far, far away, one that would make suspension of disbelief almost impossible. On the other hand, though, if the Star Wars movie in question is the one that’s going to be directed by Taika Waititi, then that’s an altogether more interesting and exciting prospect.
