Dwayne Johnson Costar Calls This Movie One of the Worst Ever Made
Rosamund Pike is pulling no punches about Doom, the early sci-fi actioner she made with Dwayne Johnson, calling the video game adaptation one of the worst films ever made — and a hard lesson in how to survive the action genre.
Rosamund Pike just revisited her early swing at the action genre and, wow, she did not pull punches. On a recent podcast, she looked back at Doom, the 2005 sci-fi shooter adaptation co-starring Dwayne Johnson and Karl Urban, and basically lit the whole thing on fire.
How she remembers Doom
Pike told the How to Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast that stepping into Doom made her realize something pretty fundamental about herself.
"How utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star."
She signed on to Doom while she was in the thick of Pride & Prejudice, figuring if she could vault onto hay bales in a corset, she could probably handle blasting monsters on Mars. The movie, adapted from the long-running video game series by id Software, follows space marines tangling with demonic nasties. You know the drill.
The on-set reality check
According to Pike, the vibe on set was all-in on toughness: weapons drills, lots of physical prep, and, yes, actual weights parked around the stages. The reverence for the game was intense.
"Every time a gun was brought out it was kind of like a holy relic for the Doom fans."
It left her feeling out of her depth almost immediately, despite sharing the screen with Johnson and Karl Urban.
The result and the fallout
Andrzej Bartkowiak directed the film, which landed with a thud: critics largely panned it, and the box office couldn’t bail it out.
"An absolute bomb... probably one of the worst films ever made."
Commercially, it scraped together about $58 million worldwide against an estimated $60 million budget. All this came right after Pike’s early breakout as a Bond girl in 2002’s Die Another Day, so the whiplash was real.
- Doom (2005): Directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak
- Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike
- Based on: id Software’s sci-fi shooter series
- Premise: Space marines vs. demonic threats on Mars
- Box office: ~$58 million worldwide on an estimated $60 million budget
What she took from it
About 20 years on, Pike says Doom taught her to actually research game-based projects before saying yes. Back then, she didn’t really live in the gaming world, and the mismatch caught up with her. Lesson learned, and honestly, credit for the candor.