Of all the attempts to bring video games to the silver screen, Andrzej Bartkowiak's 2005 adaptation of DOOM wouldn't be in my personal top ten of stinkers – not when the likes of Alone in the Dark, Monster Hunter, Double Dragon and House of the Dead exist.
Now, don't get me wrong – I'm not saying it's a stone-cold classic, either (although I still think that FPS sequence is really clever) – but it seems that one of its stars, Rosamund Pike, doesn't consider it to be a film she's happy to have on her otherwise impressive CV.
Speaking on the How to Fail podcast (thanks, IGN), Pike really stuck the knife in on the movie, in which she co-starred alongside Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Karl Urban:
“The film was an absolute bomb. It probably could have ended my career. It was 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. But then it wasn't career-ending for The Rock, or me as it turned out.
It was probably after that that I started to do my research. Because I didn't know enough about video games. I wasn't the right kind of girl to be in that. I didn't want to be the sex symbol. So it's okay I guess to fail at being an action star if to be an action star in those days was to be the absolute bombshell sex symbol. I just wasn't that person.
And so, as the girl in a film like that, if the film is a bomb, you do think, s**t, it's because I wasn't hot enough. It's not the total, obviously, the failure of the film, but if loads of guys say that film is s**t, your part in it is to play your character but also look hot. And I don't think I got that or took that seriously, or worked out for the gym body that a better female action star would have done."
Also, nobody helped me. Nobody said. Nowadays, I'm sure an actress cast in that would have a personal trainer. There would be a conversation about, you're playing Lara Croft, this is how she should look."
DOOM made $58.7 million on a budget rumoured to be between $60 and $70 million, and was followed in 2019 by the direct-to-video DOOM: Annihilation.
It's fair to say, then, that id Software's famous first-person shooter hasn't had the same fortunes as, say, Resident Evil or Sonic when it comes to box-office clout.
Thankfully, Pike's career doesn't seem to have been negatively impacted by the film. She would go on to land roles in productions such as Johnny English Reborn (2011), Jack Reacher (2012), The World's End (2013) and Saltburn (2023), and would earn a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in David Fincher's Gone Girl (2014). She also won awards for her contributions to I Care a Lot (2020) and the TV series State of the Union (2019).