‘Black Adam’ is Dwayne Johnson’s biggest domestic box-office debut as a leading man – but the actor is still struggling to find his footing on the big screen as ‘Creed.’
It took nearly 20 years for Dwayne Johnson’s name to be placed among the ranks of film greats. For a while, at least.
Black Adam, the 1980s action flick from director John Singleton, was his breakout summer hit, and the one major film that he’s always been convinced deserved the best possible placement on the all-time best-ever list in the industry.
It was, even then, a very long time since he’d been able to make an international splash like that: in the year of the movie, his first starring role on the big screen in Legend of the Seeker, a hit in the U.K. in 1976.
Though the film didn’t quite make enough money to keep going, it’s still a movie that Johnson has cited as his favorite performance of his career, and he’s long held his hopes to revisit it on the big screen again someday in a suitably bigger budgeted outing.
Today, though, he has more to celebrate than just a new film release.
It’s the first time Johnson, as he is now, is playing a leading man on a film that has a domestic box-office gross of more than $340 million. That’s a record for the actor behind an action movie.
His Black Adam marks the debut of the Black Empire, a group of villains whose main goal is to bring humanity a little closer to them.
It’s a group that, in a sense, began in the film itself.
The Black Empire has a new villain in Johnson, playing a villain who has his own agenda and doesn’t want to let humanity go extinct.
‘Black Adam’ is Johnson’s biggest domestic box-office debut as a leading man. In 20th Century Fox’s domestic box office hit, the actor plays a villain whose agenda is to bring humanity a little closer to him.
It’s Johnson’s first major hit since he left the Marvel franchise in 2018 in favor of his own Black Adam solo film, and one