Dwayne Johnson has had a steady presence in Hollywood for over two decades, and in that time he’s appeared in a handful of video game movies. In addition to headlining film adaptations of Doom and Rampage, The Rock was also part of the ensemble cast of the most recent Jumanji movies, where the delivery system for the title world evolved from a board game into a video game. Now Johnson has announced he has another video game movie on the way.
So what is this next project we can add to the list of upcoming Dwayne Johnson movies? Well, for now, the WWE champion is keeping quiet about what game is being turned into a film, but he did say the following to Men’s Journal when asked if he had plans to bring video game characters to the big screen:
I can’t tell you which game in particular we’re doing, but there will be an announcement this year. We’re going to bring one of the biggest, most badass games to the screen—one that I’ve played for years. I’m really excited to bring it to fans around the world. Of course we’re going to do right by our gamer friends—but really we’re just going to make a great movie.
That’s not much to work with, although Dwayne Johnson’s mention of playing this video game for “years” means we can rule out anything recently released. Still, describing said game as “badass” barely narrow the field of candidates. Are we talking about a modern game that’s been waiting for a long time to be turned into a movie, like Gears of War (which Dave Bautista was attached to as of 2019)? Or maybe, in the vein of Rampage, Johnson is referring to an arcade game he played when he was younger, like Space Invaders.
We’ll learn the answer sometime later this year, assuming something doesn’t happen that requires Dwayne Johnson to push back the announcement. Hopefully Johnson and whoever else is attached to the project have better luck with this than 2005’s Doom, which was critically derided and The Rock even made fun of back in 2018. That’s the same year Rampage was released, and along with being met with a more mixed critical reception, it collected around $428 million worldwide. As for Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Jumanji: The Next Level, both of those flicks were critical and commercial successes, and Jumanji 4 is still in development.
This mystery project is one of many video game film adaptations on the way. Next month sees the release of the Tom Holland-led Uncharted, and in April, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 will reunite us with Ben Schwartz’s version of the super speedy mammal and introduce us to Idris Elba’s take on Knuckles. Other upcoming video game movies include Super Mario Bros., Borderlands and Minecraft. It’s also looking like Mortal Kombat 2 might be coming together, although there’s been no official announcement about the sequel moving forward yet.
Going back to Dwayne Johnson, he can be seen playing Black Adam in the DC Extended Universe starting July 29, as well as heard as Krypto the Superdog in DC League of Super Pets in May. Word’s also come in that he’ll be teaming with Chris Evans on Red One, his Christmas-set action movie.
