Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Says That ‘Rampage’ Will Avoid the Video Game Film Curse

Let's just say it right now – most video-game-to-movie translations suck. Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros. were cornball beyond belief; the Assassin's Creed movie wasn't everything it was supposed to be; and don't even get us started with Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Or, for that matter, any of Uwe Boll's films. Yikes.

But Rampage will be different. Set to release on April 13 (recently moved up a week), the film features Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and promises to be chock full of monstrous action. And, according to its lead star, it will avoid the video game curse.

Now, granted, Johnson knows all about video game movie failure, as he appeared in the big-screen adaptation of Doom years ago – something fans of the series want to forget. But he actually acknowledged it while speaking with Total Film Magazine about the movie, and how Rampage will take a different route.

"I like the video game curse, because I made Doom," he acknowledged while laughing. "And Doom was a movie based off a very popular video game and was incredibly unsuccessful. So I lived the curse, and I experienced it."

With that, he really put a lot of research into his Rampage project, making sure it was "buttoned up" to be more of a monster movie experience, with a strong script and giant creatures put together by the effects team at Weta.

But there was more to it than that. Johnson said, "Also making sure that there was a winking charm and humor in Rampage that, for me personally, was not in Doom," he noted.

Johnson also said that Rampage didn't have much story to build off of, outside of "these people got transformed into giant animals and started wrecking the place." Obviously, things are different for the film, as the creatures become enlarged by chemicals, instead of originally starting out as humans.

"(Fans of the game) get all the things that you remember about it and you can smile about," said director Brad Peyton, who previously worked with Johnson in San Andreas. "But then there's all this room to do things and build a story and build characters and do what I wanted. That allows us to exceed expectations and have a lot of fun and just deliver in a way that a good movie needs to deliver."

We certainly wish Johnson, Peyton and the Rampage team the best of luck. We need a good monster movie, and not another bad video game adaptation.

Rampage hits theaters on April 13.