I really don’t know what kind of career advice Dwayne Johnson has been getting over the last several years. The wrestler-turned-actor showed some promise early on in the mediocre The Scorpion King (2002) and Be Cool (2005), his career took a distinct downturn with the video game adaptation Doom into lowbrow kiddie fare like The Game Plan and Return To Witch Mountain. His appearances in good films like Get Smart and the recent The Other Guys seem more like statistical anomalies rather than choices powered by the same reasoning that lead him to do The Tooth Fairy.
But with the action film Faster slated for release this November and being currently in production of The Fast And The Furious 5, it certainly seems as if his career is tacking back towards the course it was on in the early half of this past decade. So it seems a bit odd, and perhaps a bit of a regression, that Johnson is in final negotiations to star in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, a sequel to 2008’s 3D family adventure film Journey To The Center Of The Earth. The Hollywood Reporter‘s Heat Vision blog is stating that the actor is in final negotiations with the studio and a deal should be finalized by the weekend.
Journey To The Center Of The Earth was actually the harbinger of the current 3D craze and featured Brandon Fraiser as a professor who discovers a path to a hidden underground world and sets off to explore it with his nephew, played by Josh Hutcherson. Hutcherson is returning as the focus of the new film, with Johnson stepping in as adult supervision since negotiations broke down with Frasier. Johnson will play the boyfriend of Hutcherson’s character’s mother who gets pulled in to a quest to the titular mysterious island to search for his missing grandfather.
Like the first film, this one is also loosely based on a Jules Verne novel. Verne’s novel was a sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and featured the pirate submarine commander Captain Nemo. There’s no word if the character will appear here, though if he does, Journey 2 will have beaten all three competing 20,000 Leagues properties currently in development in getting him to the big screen.
Shooting is scheduled to start later in October in North Carolina and then Hawaii. The movie will be shoot in 3D.
I don’t know if taking sequels Brendon Fraser passes on is really all that good for career longevity.
The career advice was obviously to diversify and not be stuck in an action rut or to only appeal to macho male audiences, and I think it worked, I for one take him more seriously as an actor now.