Dwayne Johnson may not be directly responsible, but you can definitely make an argument that he helped play a part in The Legend of Hercules crashing and burning at the box office back in 2014.
While he definitely wasn’t a driving force for how terrible Renny Harlin’s historical epic turned out – with the swords-and-sandals blockbuster well-deserving of its five percent Rotten Tomatoes score and six Razzie nominations – it was hardly appointment viewing for anybody considering the biggest star on the planet had his own spin on the Greek demigod set for release just a few months later.
The Rock’s Hercules wasn’t exactly a winner, either, but it fared much better among critics and annihilated Kellan Lutz’s iteration in terms of ticket sales, with the $70 million Legend failing to even recoup its production costs. Watching the film, though, you’ve got to wonder where all the money went when the CGI, green screen, and digital backdrops are all painfully unconvincing and distractingly bad.
Perhaps Netflix subscribers will be able to uncover the reasons why, seeing as FlixPatrol has outed The Legend of Hercules as one of the most-watched features on the platform’s global charts. Historical sword-swingers are irresistible to at-home audiences and always have been, but there are few worse than Harlin’s colossal misfire.
Not that people seem to mind, when the promise of old-timey battles, dust, and blood has proven to be as much of a hook for Netflix users as any other genre, bar those that promise much in the way of eroticism.