It's safe to say that the video game genre has come in for a lot of abuse over the last few years. But while the recently released Tomb Raider proved that it's not impossible to make an engaging and hugely entertaining film of such ilk, Dwayne Johnson is confident that Rampage is finally going to put the supposed "curse" of the video game adaptation that has blighted Hollywood for so long to bed once and for all.
Dwayne Johnson admitted as much to CinemaBlend when we were lucky enough to visit the set of Rampage last year. When he was asked what made Rampage the perfect game for adaptation, Dwayne Johnson responded:
Well I can only speak for me, personally. So I just know from my taste and my experiences in playing the game --- I loved the game when I was a kid. When I got a little older, I had it on Nintendo; loved it then. It's such a simple premise, so the challenge was to take this fun simple premise and try to build out and hopefully make a cool movie out of it. I think we've been doing some good stuff on set here that might lend itself to a pretty good movie. And you know, again, there are just some really cool elements that if you do it right, hopefully it can turn into something that's really cool. Because you've got three gigantic monsters who've been mutated through genetic editing, and you have a hero in Naomie Harris' character, and then you have some big bald brown guy running around, shooting shit, and trying not to get killed.
For director Brad Peyton, the reason why Rampage is the perfect video game to adapt was much simpler. Peyton had a much more serious response as well, though, as he insisted that he was immediately attracted to how much he could deviate from the source material, and expand it into a fully fledged cinematic world. Peyton said:
What I liked about it was that you could expand on it so much, that there wasn't a whole lot you had to adhere to. I thought that it led itself tonally to a fun direction, and of course there are the creatures. But grounding it in real science with C.R.I.S.P.R., Dwayne's characterizations -- his relationships in the movie. There was just a lot of room to make it my own and do my own thing with it. So, rather than doing...first of all, I play video games, and like I'd be scared shitless to do like, Modern Warfare or Assassin's Creed or one of those games where you're like, 'Okay this game is so deep in its own mythology and those characters are so defined,' there's a lot of pressure that comes with that, and sticking to those things. For me, you'd have to be a real die-hard fan to have a shot at doing things right.
The director continued.
Because when I initially got it, it wasn't a type of movie that I would wanna do -- it wasn't very grounded. But then we developed it into a direction where there was more emotion, more grounding, but still maintaining all the fun of it, and it was something both Dwayne and I thought we could really kind of, with both his skill set and my skill set, could really make work.
Here's what Rampage will look like:
We'll get to see if Dwayne Johnson and Brad Peyton succeeded in expanding Rampage into a fully-fledged movie when it is released on April 13.
