10 Worst Times Movie Actors Were Combined With CGI

2. Dwayne Johnson - The Mummy Returns

will smith aladdin
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?

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.