Rosamund Pike has led an equally star-studded career as her peers, if not more. She has given absolutely mind-blowing performances, worked with other A-listed stars, and created some of the most magical masterpieces ever, like her all-time best 2005 classic novel adaptation, Pride & Prejudice. Yet even in that star-studded career, she has had a few failures as well.
One of these failures includes her first and last movie with Dwayne Johnson, 2005’s video game-based Doom, which Pike is “embarrassed” to have starred in. But it wasn’t because the movie turned out to be a stinker, no. Rather, the reason why Rosamund Pike was this embarrassed about starring in Doom was because she partly blamed herself for its failure.
Rosamund Pike has one too many Regrets about Doom
Of all the movies and television shows that she has starred in, perhaps Doom is the most critically panned one, especially by gamers. While it was expected to blow up the box office, it instead ended up bombing at it. And Rosamund Pike feels she is partly to blame for this failure.
Talking with Collider about the 2005 video game-based sci-fi/action film in which she starred alongside Dwayne Johnson and Karl Urban, the Gone Girl star expressed the same. She said she was one of the people on whom the blame game rests because:
“I think I failed just through ignorance and innocence to understand, to fully get a picture of what Doom meant to fans at that point. I wasn’t a gamer. I didn’t understand.”
Continuing, Pike even let out that had she acquired as deep and thorough knowledge about the game and everything about it before as she did now, she “would have dived right into all of that and got fully immersed in it.”
Ben Affleck’s Smile is the Reason Why He Was Cast in $369 Million Worth Hit Movie With Rosamund Pike
But the damage was done, and she couldn’t do anything about it. This is what further made her embarrassed about the same. As she Saltburn actress continued to confess:
“I feel embarrassed, really. I feel embarrassed that I was sort of ignorant of what it meant and I didn’t know how to go about finding out because the internet wasn’t the place it is now for the fans to speak up. I wouldn’t have known where to find them. I do now! In fact, I now have many friends who were massive fans of the game and I just wish I had known them then.”
Well, Rosamund Pike may have been surrounded by ignorance then, which led to the Karl Urban starrer Doom becoming a massive failure.
But since then, she has learned more about it now (as can be deciphered from her excited “I do now!”) and most certainly won’t be making the same mistake if she ever stars in another video game live-action adaptation.
As opposed to Dwayne Johnson’s Expectations, Doom turned out to be a Stinker
While on the one hand, Rosamund Pike was blissfully surrounded by ignorance, Dwayne Johnson, on the other, was massively excited about the project, as can be understood from how much he “loved the script” of Doom and was a “big fan of the game”.
At least according to Hollywood, that’s what he said. He even disclosed another reason why he went forward with the project:
“Frankly because the movies in the past that were adapted from video games have been ok. They’ve made a ton of money box office-wise, but you walk away going, ‘That was all right.’ I remember calling Universal and saying, ‘We’ve got a shot if we stayed true to the game and remained unapologetic in our approach. When it’s time to blow demons away, to blow them away.’”
If looking from Dwayne Johnson’s “ambitious” perspective, that’s all that the live-action film of the video game needed to become successful: “No PG-13 style” and “if it’s time to die, it’s time to die the way you should be dying in doom.”
However, when this project finally came out to be, it was nothing short of a blow — both to the gaming audiences as well as to the cast and crew of the film. And by a “blow”, we mean “a literal box-office disaster” that every self-respecting gamer disowned.
Not only did the film garner massively critical reviews (it ranks at a meager 18% rating on the Tomatometer), but it brought in only $58 million from worldwide box offices, not even making up its entire production budget of $60 million, as per Box Office Mojo. Well, better luck next time?
