Back in February, the marketing campaign for Dwayne Johnson's latest movie, Skyscraper, kicked off not just with the Super Bowl trailer, but a poster that showed Johnson's character, Will Sawyer, jumping from the edge of a crane to an open window in the eponymous structure. The internet had a lot of fun with this Skyscraper poster, mainly pointing out how in real life, there's no way Sawyer makes it out of that scenario alive. Skyscraper' s director, Rawson Marshall Thurber, also got a kick out of the poster, but noted that it doesn't correctly show the distance of Sawyer's jump in the actual movie. As Thurber put it:
I loved them and we all kind of laughed and went, 'Yeah! They're not wrong!' What was really interesting is that poster, bless their hearts in marketing, the distance of that jump was I think double of what's in the movie. So I think we deserved the memes and question marks to be made fun of for something like that. In the film itself, the jump is much more believable. It's still exaggerated of course but it's probably ten percent cinematic license there. Not a seventy-five foot jump.
Make no mistake, when you sit down for Skyscraper this weekend, you will see Dwayne Johnson jumping to reach the skyscraper, but as Rawson Marshall Thurber told CinemaBlend's own Conner Schwerdtfeger, it's not nearly as long as the poster makes it out to be. Under the laws of physics, Will Sawyer meets his untimely demise no matter how he jumps off that crane in the poster. Granted, like with most action movies, Skyscraper is operating in an exaggerated reality, but it's not quite as ridiculous as the poster made it out to be. Clearly, though, there aren't any hard feelings on Thurber's part towards the marketing team, as he enjoyed the memes that were spawned from that poster. Oh, and "spoiler" alert, Sawyer makes it to the other side intact during Skyscraper.
Set in The Pearl, the world's tallest and safest skyscraper in Hong Kong that houses several floors that function as their own society, Skyscraper sees Will Sawyer, former FBI agent and the building's head of security, having to combat attacking terrorists. Making matters worse, not only is Sawyer's family trapped inside, but he is framed for the assault. Along with Dwayne Johnson, the cast includes Neve Campbell, Chin Han, Roland Møller, Pablo Schreiber, Noah Taylor, Hannah Quinlivan, Matt O'Leary, Byron Mann, McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell, among others.
Skyscraper opens in theaters this Friday, July 13, but you can read CinemaBlend's review of the movie and what other critics thought of it now. Don't forget to also look through our 2018 release schedule to learn what other movies will arrive later this year.
