Dwayne Johnson is the most bankable movie star in Hollywood. Not only does the former wrestler star in movies that shatter box office records (The Fast series), he also features in multiple movies a year. There are few actors working as hard as Johnson (his buddy Kevin Hart is one of them) and as expected, there will be a new action film starring the muscular actor hitting theaters this summer.
If you think Skyscraper looks like an original twist on a familiar flick, you wouldn’t be wrong. Director and writer Rawson Marshall Thurber, who worked on Central Intelligence with Johnson and Hart, is helming Skyscraper, and revealed to LA Times that the classic Sylvester Stallone film Cliffhanger influenced the creation of his movie. “When I was in post-production on Central Intelligence, I saw Creed, and I loved it,” he began. “I started watching a bunch of Sylvester Stallone pictures and one of them was Renny Harlin’s [1993 action film] Cliffhanger, which I remember loving when I was a kid.” Johnson revealed that Skyscraper is reverent to the Bruce Willis classic Die Hard.
“Rawson gave me a preamble of what it was and immediately I was in, because it was different, it was fresh, it was cool,” Johnson stated. “It had this clear reverence for movies we loved, like The Towering Inferno and Die Hard and The Fugitive, and it felt like it had the potential to be something that audiences really liked.”
Skyscraper hits theaters on July 13.
