The “Black Adam” Dwayne Johnson Flop

Adrian Cruce
4 min readDec 20, 2022

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Screenshot from the “Black Adam” movie

A couple of days ago I watched “ Black Adam “, the movie that, according to Dwayne Johnson, was supposed to change the hierarchy of the DC Universe forever. I still laugh about that now and will keep doing this for a very long time. The movie was so far away from that. In fact, it was so far away from a good movie that it was kind of cringe to watch.

A Quick Personal Review Of “Black Adam”

The one thing that instantly stood out was that this is 100% not a movie that was in development for15 years. The project might have been in the work for so long but this movie that was released suffers from a clear lack of development.

At the end of the day, this movie has huge problems. The CGI was decent but the movie as a whole is hugely problematic. We have the obvious Dwayne Johnson acting, which was so sub-par for the character, but this is something we all knew for a long time. Out of all the WWE wrestlers who transitioned into acting, The Rock is the most unidimensional one. Dave Bautista is, most likely, the most complex. Dwayne Johnson is far from that.

When you have the main character in the movie as someone you cannot possibly relate to in any way, the movie is bound to flop. At the very least, it will not get a sequel.

The script.

The script sucked.

It is as easy as that.

Black Adam “ had a really bad script that made it virtually impossible to connect with the main character. It was supposed to be the first in the series, a sort of origin story. And the origin was very rushed. Very lackluster. It explained some things but in a way that was simply not good. Johnson seems to love to compare this movie with Captain America 1. But, Captain America 1 was a whole lot better.

The script for this movie was so rushed that it seems like the only things the producers relied on were the following of Dwayne Johnson, an aggressive marketing campaign, special effects, and the loyalty of DC fans. All of these cannot be enough when the script is bad.

More Than A Bad Movie

We all know that some movies end up as a success even if they have a bad script and bad acting. In fact, it happens way more often than it should. “ Once Upon A Time In Hollywood “ was an incredibly distasteful piece of crap script with good acting but so many human-related problems. And it was a financial success.

So, what was the problem with “ Black Adam “?

We have the obvious, the fact that the market is saturated with superhero movies. And the Black Adam character is not as popular as Batman or others. But, there is so much more to this.

The marketing campaign was incredibly aggressive. And after this movie, how can you even trust the “professional” reviewers anymore? There were so many great reviews about the movie that it looked like it was so incredibly good. In reality, it looks like all of these were bought because you cannot look at this movie and write a good review of it. You simply cannot if you have some integrity.

Then, sales started to be bad and desperation grew. Dwayne Johnson lost A LOT of face and respect after this movie as he carefully tried to make the situation seem better than it was. He even went on to lie about the sales of “Black Adam. Combine this with the fact that people started to realize he most likely takes steroids and his diet is not as he says it is and we have a bad picture about him as a person.

Now, leaving that aside, we also learned that Dwayne Johnson refused to appear in “Shazam 2. This makes zero sense. Dwayne Johnson was fixated on fighting Superman. Based on the movie, this also did not make sense since Black Adam was portrayed in a way that made it quite obvious he would be no match for Superman.

But the money is in fighting Superman, not Shazam. Ain’t that right?

Final Thoughts

I could go on for ages writing about how bad “ Black Adam “ was. But that would actually bring in way too much attention to a flop movie.

I seriously doubt Dwayne Johnson will be able to recover after this. I seriously doubt anyone would want to work with him after this. And I wouldn’t blame them. The Rock put everything into this blockbuster movie that should have been a whole lot better than it turned out.

It is as simple as that.

Do yourself a favor: DO NOT WATCH BLACK ADAM! You will not lose anything!

Originally published at https://acramblings.blogspot.com.

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