Rosamund Pike says all-time video game movie disaster Doom was so bad it could have “ended her career.”
Speaking on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast (H/T The Independent), Pike recalled filming Pride and Prejudice when she got the call to appear alongside Dwayne Johnson as Dr. Sam Grimm in the 2005 video game adaptation of id Software’s classic boomer shooter series.
‘Yeah, I can do anything. I can jump on this hay bale in my crinoline, so I can certainly go and kill some zombies on Mars,'” Pike said, not without – presumably – a great deal of hubris.
“So suddenly I’m in this film with The Rock, and I realise how utterly ill-equipped I am to be an action star,” Pike said, despite making her big-screen bow in 2003’s Die Another Day.
Pike added, “It was an absolute bomb. I mean, I probably could have ended my career. It was just probably one of the worst films ever made. I mean, it was a catastrophe. I don’t read the reviews, but you get the sense like you’re lucky to have survived that one.”
The end result, as Pike attests to, was “catastrophic.” Long held up as one of the worst video game movies ever made, the ill-fated Doom made a loss on its $60 million budget, even if the first-person sequence was an experimental taste of a movie that wasn’t otherwise mired in the sort of predictable plotting, cardboard characterization, and sterile action set-pieces that it became known for. There is a reason, after all, it currently holds an 18% ‘Rotten’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.
But it certainly wasn’t a career killer for Pike, who went on to receive acclaim in the likes of Gone Girl and Saltburn. Fellow Doom co-stars Johnson and Karl Urban certainly went on to do well for themselves, with Urban returning to the video game movie space this year as Johnny Cage in Mortal Kombat 2.
For more, check out the upcoming video game movies currently in the works, plus our list of the best video game movies ever made.