The 2005 video adaptation Doom (watch it HERE) should have been awesome, given that it was based on a game about teleportation experiments on the moons of Mars opening the gates of Hell. Pair that great set-up with a solid cast that included Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and it could have been something special. But instead we got a bland, dull movie about mutants created through genetic experiments involving Martian chromosomes. Since the movie failed to properly bring the concepts of the game to the screen, Doom was a box office bomb… and it’s a project that Rosamund Pike now looks back on with embarrassment.
Speaking with Collider, Pike revealed that she feels “party to blame” for the film’s failure, because
I think I failed just through ignorance and innocence to understand, to fully get a picture of what Doom meant to fans at that point. I wasn’t a gamer. I didn’t understand. If I knew what I know now, I would have dived right into all of that and got fully immersed in it like I do now. And I just didn’t understand. I feel embarrassed, really. I feel embarrassed that I was sort of ignorant of what it meant and I didn’t know how to go about finding out because the internet wasn’t the place it is now for the fans to speak up. I wouldn’t have known where to find them. I do now! In fact, I now have many friends who were massive fans of the game and I just wish I had known them then.”
Now that she’s starring in The Wheel of Time, an Amazon series based on a series of fantasy novels by Robert Jordan, Pike has
fully embraced the fan culture of this book series. I’ve spent hours finding out what they love and hearing what they have to say and seeing what they discuss on the chat rooms and all of that. And I just wish I had known to do that for Doom. So it’s a source of kind of regret for me that — I just didn’t know enough about the business to be perfectly honest.”
It’s interesting to hear Pike’s perspective on (part of) what went wrong with Doom, but I don’t think she should blame herself in any way. It wouldn’t have mattered how familiar she was with the game, because the material she was given to work with wasn’t a good adaptation of it to begin with.