Dwayne Johnson has been a fixture in Hollywood for over two decades now, and somewhere along the way he turned into a completely different actor than the one I actually liked. This Spotlight is basically a breakup letter.
Johnson made his way into movies off the back of a massive wrestling career as The Rock, first showing up on screen in The Mummy Returns in 2001 before headlining The Scorpion King a year later. For a solid stretch after that, he was actually fun to watch. Then something shifted, and here we are.
The Dwayne Johnson I Liked
Early Johnson had real presence. Not the "look how big my arms are" kind, the kind where he could carry a scene on charisma alone. Watch him in The Game Plan, playing a football star who suddenly has to raise the daughter he didn't know existed, and you can see an actor who knows how to be funny and a little vulnerable without losing his screen presence. Same with Tooth Fairy, a silly premise that only works because he commits to it instead of coasting on muscle. That's the version of Dwayne Johnson I signed up for.
The Project Selection
Here's where it gets messy. Early on, his choices were actually varied, Get Smart, Tooth Fairy, The Game Plan, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Pain & Gain. That last one deserves a shoutout. Michael Bay's Pain & Gain gave him an unhinged, layered performance as a bodybuilder caught up in a kidnapping scheme gone wrong, and it's one of the only times post-wrestling Johnson actually got to play a person instead of a brand.
Then Fast Five happened in 2011, and Luke Hobbs became the role that redefined him. It worked, at first. But somewhere after that, his choices calcified into one formula: unstoppable, indestructible, superhuman. Rampage, San Andreas, and Skyscraper are technically three different movies with three different premises, but they all star the same guy surviving the same kind of catastrophe with the same blank invincibility. Hobbs & Shaw took the bit and ran it into the ground, and it was just tiring to watch.
Then came the real low points. Red One turned into a mess both on screen and off, with reports of a production that ballooned to around $250 million partly because of Johnson's own scheduling issues on set. Black Adam, his big DC swing, lost Warner Bros. an estimated $50 to $100 million against a roughly $195 million budget, and any franchise plans got shelved almost immediately after. Two different genres, two expensive misfires, same problem: leaning on him as the entire selling point wasn't enough anymore.
Range vs. Commitment
This is the part that actually pisses me off, because the range is clearly there when he decides to use it. Pain & Gain proved it years ago. More recently, The Smashing Machine, where he plays real life MMA fighter Mark Kerr under Benny Safdie's direction, is a genuinely strong, stripped down performance. No persona, no invincibility, just a guy dealing with addiction and insecurity. It got a fifteen minute standing ovation at Venice and Golden Globe buzz, even if the box office didn't follow and the Oscar nomination never showed up.
But that's the exception. Most of the time, Johnson picks the version of the role that asks the least of him emotionally and the most of him physically, and he commits to that one note every single time. Full effort, zero range. He shows up, he's massive, he survives things no human should survive, then he moves on to the next one.
The Drama Follows Him
It's not just the movies either. Behind the scenes, Johnson's had his fair share of noise. The Fast & Furious years brought a very public, very long feud with Vin Diesel, one that reportedly started on the set of The Fate of the Furious and dragged on for years before the two patched things up around Fast X. Tyrese Gibson got pulled into his own back and forth with Johnson too, specifically after Hobbs & Shaw underperformed compared to the mainline franchise. Add in that persistent, half-mocking rumor that he's never actually lost a fight on screen, and the sense that he tried to make himself the new center of the Fast & Furious universe at Diesel's expense, and you get a pattern of a guy who wants to be the biggest name in every single room.
Then there's Red One, where reports about him being chronically late to set, sometimes by hours, came with a detail nobody asked for: he later confirmed to GQ that yes, he peed in bottles on set to save time. He brushed the whole thing off as overblown, and his costar Chris Evans backed him up publicly, but it's exactly the kind of story that sticks to a career already losing goodwill.
And then there's the steroid conversation that just will not die. Johnson has admitted to trying steroids briefly at eighteen or nineteen and has denied using anything since, most recently after showing up noticeably leaner at Venice for The Smashing Machine and catching a fresh wave of speculation online. He calls it "100% not true" every time it comes back up. Believe him or don't, but the fact this conversation keeps resurfacing after two decades says something.
The Moment It Went Too Far
If one scene sums up where his choices ended up, it's that Hobbs & Shaw helicopter bit. Johnson physically holding back a helicopter mid-flight with one arm isn't a cool moment so much as a warning sign, the exact point where "unstoppable" stopped being a character trait and just became the whole personality. It's not an isolated incident either. It's the blueprint for basically everything he's done since.
Most recently, that same instinct to lean on spectacle over substance showed up again with the live action Moana remake, where his return as Maui came with a wig so widely mocked online that even Weird Al Yankovic joked about the resemblance to his own hair. Johnson laughed it off publicly, but it's one more project riding on his name instead of earning attention on its own.
TWC Recommends
- The Entry Point: The Game Plan (2007). This is peak "actually likeable Dwayne Johnson," funny, a little sentimental, and built around him actually acting instead of surviving explosions. Start here if you want to remember why people liked him in the first place.
- The Deep Cut: The Smashing Machine (2025). Strip the persona away completely and this is the proof he can still do it when he wants to. Quiet, vulnerable, and easily the best thing he's done in years, even if barely anyone watched it in theaters.
Do you think Dwayne Johnson still has range in him, or has he leaned so far into the invincible action guy thing that there's no coming back?
Drop your take in the comments, I want to know if I'm the only one who misses old Dwayne.
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