The video game film adaptation curse was a real thing and none of the studios could get it right. One of the biggest disappointments was Universal Pictures’ Doom, the 2005 adaptation of the first-person shooter that starred both Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Rosamund Pike.
The film failed to tap into the spirit of the game and fans rejected it, with the box office failing to surpass the massive $60M budget.
All of these years later, Rosamund Pike is reflecting back on the experience, expressing deep regret and embarrassment that she pins of lack of experience and…internet access.
“I feel partly to blame in that respect because I think I failed just through ignorance and innocence to understand, to fully get a picture of what Doom meant to fans at that point,” Pike tells Collider while out promoting Amazon’s forthcoming “Wheel of Time” series.
“I wasn’t a gamer,” she honestly recollects. “I didn’t understand. If I knew what I knew now, I would have dived right into all of that and got fully immersed in it like I do now. And I just didn’t understand. I feel embarrassed, really. I feel embarrassed that I was sort of ignorant of what it meant and I didn’t know how to go about finding out because the internet wasn’t the place it is now for the fans to speak up. I wouldn’t have known where to find them. I do now! In fact, I now have many friends who were massive fans of the game and I just wish I had known them then.”
She doesn’t elaborate and it would have been awesome to know what she would or could have done differently. With that said, she now fully immerses herself in the content she’s helping bring to the screen.
“I fully embraced the fan culture of this book series,” she reaffirms. “I’ve spent hours finding out what they love and hearing what they have to say and seeing what they discuss on the chat rooms and all of that. And I just wish I had known to do that for Doom. So it’s a source of kind of regret for me that — I just didn’t know enough about the business to be perfectly honest.”
Andrzej Bartkowiak directed Doom, in which Space Marines are sent to investigate strange events at a research facility on Mars but find themselves at the mercy of genetically enhanced killing machines.