After Dwayne Johnson made his display appearing debut as The Scorpion King in The Mummy Returns, Johnson returned to this function in his feature-film starring debut, the 2002 spin-off The Scorpion King, for which he was paid $5.5 million, a record-breaking wage for a first-time main man. The success of The Scorpion King led to starring roles within the motion movies Doom, The Rundown, and Strolling Tall, and whereas Johnson’s starring automobiles all through the 2000s had various ranges of success, the actor established himself as a sturdy motion star who was destined for superstardom.
On the daybreak of the 2010s, Johnson’s established wage had eclipsed $10 million per movie, as Johnson, who obtained his first producer credit score on the 2013 motion thriller movie Snitch, started to implement high quality management ideas inside his profession. Nevertheless, after the 2012 action-adventure movie Journey 2: The Mysterious Island grew to become his first starring car to surpass the $100 million mark on the home field workplace, his profession took an inexplicable detour when Johnson agreed to star within the lackluster crime drama movie Empire State, which grew to become his first and solely movie to be launched straight to Blu-ray and DVD.
The one constructive side of Empire State for Johnson is that the movie was so utterly ignored on the time of its launch that lots of his die-hard followers are faintly conscious of its existence. Inside Johnson’s shrewdly calculated profession, wherein he has confirmed himself to be a grasp of branding and self-promotion, Empire State is a baffling white-elephant curiosity, the form of obtrusive mistake that the actor hadn’t made beforehand and has by no means made once more.
Dwayne Johnson Has Much less Than 20 Minutes of Display Time in ‘Empire State’
Whereas Dwayne Johnson is given front-and-center prominence within the promotional supplies for Empire State, Johnson, who was 40 when Empire State was filmed within the spring of 2012, is definitely a supporting participant within the movie. In Empire State, which is predicated on a real story, Johnson performs James Ransome, a New York police detective who investigates an armored-car repository theft that netted $11 million in 1982, the biggest money theft in American historical past, eclipsing the 1978 $5.8 million Lufthansa heist immortalized in Goodfellas.
After showing briefly within the opening scene of Empire State, which had a manufacturing value of $11 million, Johnson solely seems sporadically all through the remainder of the movie, as the majority of the remainder of the movie is carried by Liam Hemsworth, who’s woefully miscast as Chris, a Greek-American police academy reject from Queens, New York, whose job as a safety guard evokes Chris and his childhood buddy to execute the theft.
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Apart from Johnson’s age, the rushed and sloppy Empire State comprises all the weather of the “Geezer teaser” components, wherein overage however well-known actors are billed as the celebs of direct-to-video and video-on-demand motion movies regardless of having minimal display time. Whereas many big-name stars have appeared in these movies over the previous decade, together with Robert De Niro and John Travolta, the Geezer teaser style was most popularized by Bruce Willis, who appeared in additional than 20 movies over the previous decade, even amid Willis’s much-publicized cognitive decline.
Like Willis, who earned $1.5 million for 4 days of labor on the 2020 motion thriller movie Arduous Kill, Empire State offered Johnson with an exorbitant payday in relation to a restricted work schedule. Any suggestion that Empire State represented a ardour challenge for Johnson could be solely dismissed by the involvement of Empire State producer and Geezer teaser mastermind Randall Emmett, who has constructed an business out of leveraging big-name stars to generate publicity for modestly budgeted movies, most of which change into worthwhile by video-on-demand leases and gross sales.
‘Empire State’ Is Dwayne Johnson’s Most Forgotten Film
Earlier than Empire State was launched on Blu-ray and DVD in North America in 2013, the movie was given a token theatrical launch in Croatia, Mexico, and Thailand, the place the movie grossed lower than $200,000, whereas Empire State grossed simply over $4 million on Blu-ray and DVD in 2013. Within the context of Dwayne Johnson’s profession, wherein his movies have grossed greater than $14.6 billion on the worldwide field workplace, the industrial efficiency of Empire State doesn’t even rise to the extent of being an accounting rounding error. Past Empire State, the lowest-grossing movie of Johnson’s profession is the 2006 comedy-thriller Southland Tales, which grossed lower than $400,000 on the field workplace, in opposition to a manufacturing value of $17 million.
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Nevertheless, whereas Southland Tales has discovered renewed recognition over the previous 15 years, Empire State continues to wallow in digital obscurity. If Southland Tales has persistently gotten higher with age, Empire State, which presently holds a 24% viewers rating on Rotten Tomatoes, has seemingly been utterly forgotten, to the purpose the place many detailed descriptions of Johnson’s profession omit Empire State utterly, as if it doesn’t exist.
Johnson Discovered a Worthwhile Lesson with ‘Empire State’
Following Empire State, Dwayne Johnson regained stable profession footing with the 2015 catastrophe thriller San Andreas, which grossed over $470 million on the worldwide field workplace, the best whole for any non-IP Johnson starring car. The success of San Andreas, for which he was paid $25 million, corresponded together with his emergence as a enterprise mastermind. Johnson’s wide-ranging entrepreneurship, which extends from his manufacturing firm Seven Bucks Productions to a tequila model, has been as spectacular to behold as his growth as an actor over the previous decade.
Whereas Johnson has had a number of profession disappointments over the previous decade, most lately with the disappointing efficiency of Crimson One, Johnson stays one among Hollywood’s highest-paid stars. Furthermore, the actor continues to attempt to enhance as an actor, as seen together with his function as Mark Kerr within the much-anticipated upcoming biographical sports activities drama movie The Smashing Machine, which has already generated hypothesis concerning the potential for an Academy Award nomination for Johnson. Empire State is streaming on The CW and Amazon Freevee.