10 Worst Times Movie Actors Were Combined With CGI

2. Dwayne Johnson - The Mummy Returns

The Mummy Returns Dwayne Johnson
Universal Pictures

Dwayne Johnson can't seem to escape questionable CGI, and his first (and worst) brush with digital hell came in 2001's The Mummy Returns, where the actor played the powerful, fearsome Scorpion King.

This beastie appears near the end of the movie during the final battle, and his reveal is treated as a grand, hair-raising moment, but when he actually enters the light and we see what he looks like, it's hard not to laugh.

A computer-generated creation from top-to-bottom, the Scorpion King might have got away with looking so terrible had the rest of the movie not looked so good. The Mummy Returns (and its predecessor) has a filmic grit to it, and one of its biggest strengths is that it was (mostly) shot on practical sets, or at real locations. So when this huge CGI dump came trotting out with his smooth, nipple-free chest and flat, undetailed textures, the effect simply looked half-baked.

This movie cost nearly $100 million to make too, and that makes this atrocity feel all the more baffling: where the hell did all that money go?

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!