Dwayne Johnson Wants A R-rated Sequel To An Overlooked Movie
Dwayne Johnson wants to follow up one of his R-rated movies.
This article is more than 2 years old
Dwayne Johnson’s been in a lot of movies, so you can be forgiven if you’re a big fan and haven’t heard of his crime drama, Faster. It sounds like he wants you to get familiar with it though. An insider for We Got This Covered has heard that the actor is in talks for a sequel to the long-forgotten movie.
Today, we know The Rock for action and comedy movies. Sometimes, he’s even in action-comedy movies. In 2010, Dwayne Johnson had recently been in Tooth Fairy and Race to Witch Mountain. We still really knew him as that wrestling guy. Branching out a bit, he was in the movie Faster. This was a crime drama with an action bent. It was as simple as these kinds of movies could get, and was reviewed as such. The character names kind of tell you what you’re in for. Dwayne Johnson played “Driver”, Billy Bob Thorton played “Cop”, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen played “Killer”.
Roger Ebert reviewed it at the time, commenting that it was “the kind of role he’s possibly been avoiding up until now”. They said that while Dwayne Johnson had been developing himself with a softer persona coming out of the WWE, “It’s a melancholy fact of Hollywood today that “Faster” could be a good career move, sending him on the trail blazed by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.”
This is an interesting note to look back on now. We know Dwayne Johnson’s brand well. He’s a big guy with a soft heart. He plays in fun movies with lots of action, while still maintaining a brand soft enough that he does well in movies made for kids. But for a moment there, when Faster came out, there was the potential for him to be a tough, quiet guy who held guns in simple action movies.
Instead, he became an actor known for taking part in big franchises. Dwayne Johnson expects his movies to do well at the box office. He’s been in more than ten movies that have passed $400 million at the box office. Two have made over a billion so far. So why revisit an early movie that was mostly considered a flop? Faster earned $35 million at the box office on a $24 million budget. That’s not great. It came out on a Thanksgiving weekend, which sets the bar higher. Why go back to that movie now?
There’s something about the success Dwayne Johnson has seen in the past decade that makes any of his business decisions harder to question. If these talks are really happening, and he decides to either reboot Faster or make a sequel, it’s hard not to say, “He probably has a good reason.” It could simply be that he’d wanted that first movie to do better, and now he has the power in Hollywood that he can do things differently this time around.
Of course, he’ll have to fit the Faster project into his schedule. He’s been busy planning the future of Jumanji, making Black Adam happen, getting ready for the big Netflix release of Red Notice, and starting two different side businesses in 2020.
