Skyscraper director Rawson Marshall Thurber admits the movie’s original poster – which featured star Dwayne Johnson making a highly improbable leap into a building – deserved the memes it attracted. Skyscraper follows Johnson’s disabled security expert Will Ford who has to rescue his family when a group of thieves storm The Pearl, the world’s largest building. Adding to his stressful day is the raging fire threating to engulf the entire building.
Skyscraper owes a clear debt to Die Hard and The Towering Inferno – to the point Johnson himself released two homage posters to both movies – and it looks like an entertaining throwback to the Die Hard scenario movies of the 80’s and 90’s, like Under Siege and Sudden Death. That said, the movie has earned some mediocre early reviews and the film is projected for a disappointing domestic weekend.
Related: Dwayne Johnson’s Skyscraper Projected For Soft Opening Weekend
Skyscraper first came on to people’s radar thanks to the gloriously silly poster, featuring Ford in one of the movie’s key scenes, where he’s forced to jump from a crane and into The Pearl. The internet wasted no time posting memes about how impossible this leap would be, and that there’s no way Ford would survive it. Now in a new interview with CinemaBlend, director Rawson Marshall Thurber has conceded the meme creators probably have a point.
I loved them and we all kind of laughed and went, 'Yeah! They're not wrong!' What was really interesting is that poster, bless their hearts in marketing, the distance of that jump was I think double of what's in the movie. So I think we deserved the memes and question marks to be made fun of for something like that. In the film itself, the jump is much more believable. It's still exaggerated of course but it's probably ten per cent cinematic license there. Not a seventy-five-foot jump.
The leap Ford has to make in Skyscraper is still fairly unlikely, but it's not quite as logic-stretching as the one seen in the poster. Thurber is more than aware his movie is intended as a fluffy action blockbuster, so it's nice to see he’s keeping a sense of humor about the myriad barbs that were thrown at the poster.
Dwayne Johnson has enjoyed a robust run of huge blockbusters in recent years, from the Fast & Furious movies to Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle. The projected underwhelming performance of Skyscraper has some questioning whether his popularity is waning slightly, but even if the movie doesn’t do great business in the U.S., the international numbers will likely make up for that.
Besides Skyscraper, the star still has plenty of major movies on the horizon, including the Hobbs & Shaw spinoff, Jungle Cruise and a Jumanji sequel. Given the pace Johnson works at, audiences will be seeing plenty more from the actor in the near future.
More: Skyscaper (Final Trailer)
Source: CinemaBlend
