In Laman's Terms: Dwayne Johnson Solidified His Leading Man Status With Family Films

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

Nowadays, a Dwayne Johnson movie is a reliable bet to deliver some pleasing box office numbers. Oh sure, his modern-day movie star career has had its fair share of misses like Skyscraper and Baywatch. But more often than not, when you place Dwayne Johnson in a lighthearted PG-13 action movie, you get box office hits like San Andreas, Rampage and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. But it wasn't always this way, there was a period where it looked like Johnson was struggling to achieve box office clout. Such a period came directly after his first leading man gig, The Scorpion King, which managed to become a box office hit with a $165 million worldwide haul.


But right after that, Johnson was faced with a number of box office non-starters, the likes of Doom, Gridiron Gang, Walking Tall and The Rundown all came up short financially and didn't generate much in the way of critical heat. Five years after the April 2002 release of The Scorpion King, the only film Johnson appeared in that cleared $50 million domestically was the ensemble comedy Be Cool. Though it sounds like nonsense now, one couldn't help but wonder in this day and age the question of if Dwayne Johnson actually had a future as a leading man in Hollywood. Turns out, yep, just not in the genre anyone likely expected.

Live-action Disney family movie The Game Plan, starring Dwayne Johnson as a star football player who suddenly learns he has a daughter, dropped in September 2007 and managed to surpass all expectations by grossing a fantastic $90.6 million. Suddenly, Johnson's big-screen prospects were looking brighter than ever and a whole new career path opened up for the actor. This change in career trajectory was reflected eleven years ago in a June 2008 issue of Entertainment Weekly. As part of an exploration of the newest crop of Hollywood A-listers, the magazine did an extended piece with Johnson from the set of Race to Witch Mountain. In the interview, Johnson explained how his new career trajectory was playing against the type of roles Hollywood would usually hand a former WWE wrestler as he heavily focused on family movies and comedies.

Johnson wasn't just talking the talk, his subsequent performances in Tooth Fairy and The Other Guys (the latter featuring him in a small supporting role that it's hard to imagine him taking today) showed that he was turning his ambitions into reality. Heck his 2012 family movie Journey 2: The Mysterious Island even managed to give Johnson his first-ever leading man vehicle to cross $100 million domestically while also uniting him with future Rampage/San Andreas director Brad Peyton for the first time. Even lower-grossing family movie efforts like Planet 51 and Tooth Fairy that never matched the box office The Game Plan still handily exceeded the box office hauls of his earlier adult-skewing action fare and managed to elevate Johnson's career rather than diminish it.

That latter achievement is especially impressive given how frequently the sight of action movie stars doing family fare, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All The Way is used as a go-to source of mockery rather than as a signal of a flourishing career. But for Johnson, family films were where he managed to actually earn some A-list credibility and still thrives today. True, most of his 2010s leading man vehicles have been PG-13 rather than PG but all of his most successful leading man vehicles are the ones that have lots of appeal to family audiences. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Rampage are two films, for instance, you could easily bring a kid to and they'd probably gobble it up while box office dud Skyscraper had basically no appeal to the under-10 crowd that has been Johnson's target audience for over a decade now.

Of course, there are downsides to every situation, and in the case of Dwayne Johnson embracing family audiences, he did move away from unorthodox adult-skewing films like Southland Tales and Pain & Gain that have seen him deliver his best work as an actor, especially in the latter film that sees Johnson deliver some of the best acting ever seen in a Michael Bay feature. But for Johnson's box office clout, reveling in his appeal to family audiences has had nothing but upsides and upcoming projects of his like Disney's Jungle Cruise movie confirm that Dwayne Johnson is cooking up plenty of other films in that same mold for the future.