Having tried twice in the space of a few months to carve out his very own corner of the DC Universe, Dwayne Johnson ended up with absolutely nothing after being cast out of two would-be franchises at once.
Not very long after DC League of Super-Pets came and went without barely anybody noticing, Black Adam became the DCEU’s highest-grossing release in half a decade, which still wasn’t enough to see The Rock granted a stay of execution under the stewardship of James Gunn and Peter Safran.
Even though each one of them featured a post-credits scene featuring the Man in Black facing down the Man of Steel, the studio simply wasn’t interested. What often gets forgotten, though, is that Hercules was technically Johnson’s first attempt at establishing a comic book property to call his own.
The 2014 blockbuster from disgraced Hollywood exile Brett Ratner was a loose interpretation of Steve Moore’s The Thracian Wars, and it did earn a decent enough $244 million at the box office. However, despite the leading man naming the title role as the one he’d always wanted to play, a sequel never materialized.
Almost a decade on, and Hercules has at least returned to tell tall tales and lay waste to the ancient world on streaming, with FlixPatrol revealing it to be one of the top-viewed titles on Prime Video. After going zero-for-three, maybe the A-list megastar should stay away from comic books for a while.
And to think, he wore a beard made of yak pubes for nothing.
