The Rock has lived long enough to make himself the villain
From self-made hero to self-made zero
I’m always fascinated by a celebrity flameout, especially as they’ve become so rare. And just as Olivia Wilde’s soapy breakdown sustained me through the end of summer, The Rock’s totally unforced but probably inevitable fall is nourishing me as the year winds down. But first, some context.
Effort is the most essential element in The Rock’s mythos. It’s at the center of all of his most frequently used post-WWE catchphrases. It’s implied in the name of his production company (Seven Bucks, named after how much money he had in his pocket when the Canadian Football League dropped him). It’s what he loves to show everyone in his myriad workout thirst traps. Even the amount of food he eats on his “cheat days” implies a massive amount of effort just to consume.
And up until this year, The Rock has been adept at displaying the exact kind and amount of effort he wants to, while concealing the kind and amount of effort he needs to, like plastic surgery (allegedly) and steroids (allegedly, but come on). But with Black Adam and the associated shame vortex that has inadvertently dragged Henry Cavill’s career along with it, The Rock has lost his balance. After successfully and ruthlessly branding himself as an up-by-his-bootstraps self-made hero, he’s now becoming a self-made villain.
The thing I’ve always found most interesting about The Rock is how deeply uncharismatic he used to be. This wasn’t a diamond in the rough situation, where his outsized charisma shone so bright that the world had no choice but to let him be our star. This was an effortful climb to stardom. Charisma is a learned behavior, and over the course of his WWE career, he learned how to engage a crowd and really pop as a character.
The Rock has also made no secret of how much he wanted to make a successful transition from wrestling star to movie star—specifically, a movie star with “box office cache.” After his first real movie role in The Mummy Returns, where his Scorpion King plays the entire climax as an embarrassingly bad CGI creation, he mostly did straightforward action flicks where he played the hero, and family-friendly movies playing his size for laughs. Nothing earth-shaking. But then in 2011, around the time the Fast & Furious franchise decided “hey, let’s make these movies awesome, actually,” The Rock decided it was time to become a fucking movie star, actually.
After the triple box office bonanzas of Fast Five, Journey 2 The Center of the World, and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, The Rock gave himself the moniker “Franchise Viagra”; and back in 2013, we as a culture found that absolutely charming. Here was a man with the body of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the endearing swagger of Will Smith, with just enough racial ambiguity that everyone felt comfortable claiming him. Who cared that his routine for getting into various characters -all of whom seem to wear the same shirt - seemed to begin and end with what kind of bodybuilding he was doing? Not us. We loved it.
His rigid commitment to maintaining his image as his stardom developed is deeply Old Hollywood. He’s marvelously transparent about how he sees everything he does as a business. He’s shameless about self-promotion, whether he’s promoting his latest movie, his physical body, or his tequila. Everything is unapologetically in service of his brand. He even has a hagiographic biopic sitcom called Young Rock that’s in its third goddamn season. And if Black Adam had come out 10 years ago when we couldn’t get enough of him, I doubt it would have run into the same problems as it did. But The Rock has spent the 15 years that Black Adam was in development hell believing his own hype, and it looks like that’s costing him.
You—well, not you, but you if you are The Rock—can call yourself Franchise Viagra if it’s a franchise that people aren’t particularly protective of. Nobody is defending G.I. Joe lore. And listen - I count myself as a passionate Fast & Furious franchise fan. But none of us is precious about the plot integrity of what is essentially a high-octane soap opera. (So many characters have died and come back in that jawn.) So it makes sense that Dwayne would only have positive reinforcement for his belief that he truly is franchise viagra. But comic book fans are different. Comic book fans actually are quite protective of their lore and precious about plot integrity. And they’re particularly salty about someone taking a relatively complex and interesting character and rebuilding it as another monument to his unchecked ego.
And there are other, more off-putting consistencies across his movies. Like how he always has to have a male sidekick whose job is to be more physically frail and emotionally vulnerable, in order to make The Rock’s masculinity even more over-the-top. Or how he always wants to be an object of female desire, but actively avoids being overtly sexual. Or how he famously has a contractual requirement that he never take too many punches or lose any on-screen fights. All of these egotistical flourishes are, like, whatever, if you’re consistently putting out entertaining product. But too many of The Rock’s movies have been blandly terrible for it to be fun anymore. And his attitude runs perpendicular to actually playing a character rather than performing a persona or selling a brand.
Which brings us back to Black Adam, a movie that The Rock put all of his self-promotional might behind, and that by all accounts was just not fucking good. He deflected the negative reviews with his typical “I made this movie for the fans, not the critics” BS, and frankly, he truly has never cared about critical acclaim. He has, however, always cared about profit. And the consensus quickly became that Black Adam wasn’t going to turn a profit for Warner Bros. All of his very publicized effort, only to lose by the only metric he cares about. I can only assume the possibility of defeat broke his brain, because next thing you know, The Rock’s team is (allegedly!) leaking misleading financial documents that “prove” Black Adam would make a profit. Warner Bros is dealing with enough shit right now, including entirely removing one of the best shows I’ve seen in a decade from HBO Max (RIP Love Life, gone too soon). So they’ve disavowed the financial documents and the entire direction that The Rock was taking the Black Adam character. So all of his diva moves, including keeping Black Adam out of the Shazam movies where he rightfully belongs, are stacking up against him. Through massive effort, he has turned himself into one of the internet’s main characters, complete with an iOS press release:
Who knows where The Rock goes from here. Vin Diesel has very publicly and awkwardly invited him back to the Fast & Furious franchise, but since the two of them are two muscle-bound sides of the same bald-headed diva coin, I don’t see that happening. His version of Black Adam seems dead. If his ego would allow it, I’d love to see him as a Mission Impossible villain. Miniature megalomaniac Tom Cruise loves having big men like Henry Cavill as his antagonists to prove that his own version of masculinity is superior. Maybe servicing someone else’s massive unchecked ego is the hard work he needs.
I had forgotten how truly terrible the Scorpion King CGI was 😂