Dwayne Johnson's Kryptonite
I recently read an article about how people were encouraging The Southland Tales star Dwayne Johnson to run for the president. That might seem far-fetched but former grappler Jesse “The Body” Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota while Donald Trump was elected president largely because he was a famous person who was on television a lot.
The fact that a former wrestler who makes silly action movies is even being considered for the highest office in the land speaks to Johnson’s popularity and widespread appeal.
It’s easy to see why Johnson has conquered the exceedingly challenging realms of film and wrestling. He’s smart. He’s talented. He works hard. He’s extremely likable. He’s funny. Like the best action stars and wrestlers, he doesn’t take himself seriously and has a winking, meta persona that suggests that he knows exactly how ridiculous his life and career are and is having a blast being The Rock.
I like Dwayne Johnson. How can you not? He was in The Southland Tales. Everybody loves that movie.
Johnson has been extraordinarily savvy both in how he’s conducted his career and managed his public image.
Then Black Adam either happened or rather didn’t happen depending on your point of view. The two hundred and fifty million dollar superhero movie was made and released but despite what Johnson sweatily insisted, it was not a success commercially or critically.
Johnson did not just want Black Adam to be successful; he needed it to be a smash, a blockbuster, a movie that would bring him into the DC Universe and the insanely lucrative world of superheroes in the biggest possible way.
Johnson has an ego as big as his biceps that would not accept that Black Adam was widely considered a failure because it cost a fortune to make, under-performed at the box-office, had dreadful buzz, got bad reviews and inspired zero excitement or anticipation for sequels, crossovers or spin-offs.
Black Adam failed. It failed creatively. It failed commercially. It failed to make Black Adam a beloved pop culture icon. It failed to live up to Dwayne Johnson’s sky-high expectations for the character and the film.
Yet Johnson still insisted to anyone who would listen that Black Adam’s future remained bright and that you’d be seeing a whole lot more of the semi-obscure supervillain turned anti-hero, possibly in crossovers involving Zachary Levi’s Shazam and/or Henry Cavill’s Superman.
The Jumanji megastar wanted the public—his public—to think that Black Adam was a financial success that turned a sizable profit despite the widespread perception that it was a box office bomb.
Johnson had big plans for Black Adam that involved squaring off against Shazam and Superman and interacting with seemingly the whole of the DCU. He wasn’t about to let the film’s very public failure keep him from cranking out Black Adam movies for an ecstatic public until he was old and grey.
So sad that we were robbed of a feature-length version of this conflict.
It was a bad look for Johnson. It made him seem deluded, narcissistic and unwilling to accept reality or failure. That’s the thing about winners. They know how to lose graciously.
Johnson is one of pop culture’s biggest winners, both in the sense that he is extraordinarily successful in multiple fields and he’s a towering colossus of a man. But Johnson’s unwillingness to accept that Black Adam was just not going to happen made him seem petty and small.
Johnson bragged that Black Adam would mark the beginning of Phase One of the DC Universe. It turned out to be more of an ending.
The wrestler turned actor claimed that he and Warner Brothers would “continue exploring the most valuable ways Black Adam can be utilized in future DC multiverse chapters” before conceding that James Gunn, who is now in charge of the DCU, had no interest in a Black Adam sequel or a Black Adam/Superman crossover event.
It seems weirdly appropriate that Gunn would be the one to definitively put the final nail in Black Adam’s coffin because Black Adam would probably never have been green-lit if Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films hadn’t proved that obscure, C-list superheroes could become multi-billion dollar franchises.
Guardians of the Galaxy gave entirely too much hope to the people behind stuff like Black Adam and Blue Beetle.
Arrogance proved Dwayne Johnson’s Kryptonite. If he’d accepted Black Adam’s failure or made a self-deprecating joke of it it, the way Ryan Reynolds did with Green Lantern, it wouldn’t affect his public image at all. Instead Johnson was obsessed with convincing the public that Black Adam was a success, and that he was a success in the role, in a way that only amplified its failure.
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