Whatever metric you use, Rampage is already one of the more successful movies based on video games ever made. The vast majority of them have been so badly received, either critically or commercially, or both, that movies based on games are said by some to have a "curse." Dwayne Johnson recently posted to Twitter that it seemed that Rampage might be the movie that finally breaks the curse, but, in an attempt to be humble about it, he pointed out that his own career was not unsullied by said curse. After all, The Rock starred in the ill-fated Doom movie. The official Twitter account for Doom took notice of Johnson's slight and was none too pleased.
I'm guessing that the Doom Twitter account would like to just pretend that movie never happened and it is mostly upset with The Rock for even reminding people it exists. At the very least, does Dwayne really need to drag them through the mud like that? What did Doom ever do to him, besides being terrible I mean?
Doom came out in 2005 and starred Dwayne Johnson as the leader of a team of space marines on Mars fighting off an attack by other-worldly beings. While the game is a massively popular title that is in large part responsible for the popularizing of the first-person shooter genre, the movie adaptation won few fans, even though it tried to recreate the game experience with an interesting sequence in the film being done in first-person.
When Dwayne Johnson posted the tweet Rampage was sitting at 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, which would have made it the highest rated movie based on a video game according to the review aggregator. The overall score has dropped slightly since then and the movie now sits at an even 50%, which is still the best score for a movie based on a game, but it only puts Rampage a single percentage point ahead of the previous leader, last month's Tomb Raider which sits at 49%, though it also has several more reviews than Rampage currently does.
While it's difficult to argue that the curse is broken, with Rampage hovering somewhere around dead even among reviewers, the fact that the two best-reviewed movies based on video games are the two most recent, may be an indication that things are headed in the right direction. Regardless, there's apparently enough to enjoy about Rampage that half of the critics who have seen it have said so.
Maybe, like Tomb Raider, Doom will get another chance somewhere down the line. The game series recently saw a very popular entry which has given the brand new life, maybe that can be the catalyst for a potential new movie that can help wipe the bad one from memories so The Rock doesn't need to talk smack about it anymore.
