Dwayne Johnson’s $12 Trillion Movie Damage Bill

6 days ago 13

Everywhere Dwayne Johnson goes, destruction follows. Dams crack. Cars crash. Earths quake. Temples crumble. In 2001, it only took four minutes for Johnson and his undead army to wash away jabronis like a metaphorical evil flood in The Mummy Returns. It’s fitting that Johnson’s first big screen role featured him selling his soul to an Egyptian god so he could layeth the smacketh down on his enemy’s property. Since then, he’s been paid millions (and millions) of dollars to wrestle earthquakes, crash cars, and, in the case of Fast and Furious 6, pick up a beefy 250-pound man with one arm and smash him into the ceiling of a London-based police precinct. Wherever he goes, contractors, electricians, and Big Concrete know they’ll get lucrative overtime.

For 25 years, we’ve watched Johnson smash things, fail to save things from being smashed, and generally be surrounded by things being smashed (he’s really good in The Smashing Machine, by the way). To celebrate this fact, we decided to pull out our calculators and tally the damage bill for each of his movies. The timing works especially well as the live-action adaptation of Moana is opening this week, which means we’ll have more property destruction to tally as the gigantic Kakamora ship will be destroyed again.

How much damage did Johnson cause when his character Hobbs drove an ambulance onto a drone in Furious 7? What was the insurance bill after San Andreas? How much did it cost to fix that cracked Hoover Dam? We then asked ourselves if all that wanton destruction was worth it: Does more Johnson-related destruction mean bigger box office returns and higher Tomatometers for his movies? And to be clear, we’re not saying that he specifically causes all the destruction himself, just that he repeatedly tends to find himself cast in movies where lots of stuff goes boom.

To find out, we rewatched 31 of Johnson’s action/thriller movies — excluding The Mummy Returns, because he’s barely in it — calculated the amount of property damage in each, and compared that to the Tomatometer scores and box office earnings for those movies. We then put the films in five different categories, ranging from Category 1’s $1-$1,000,000 in damage to Category 5’s $100,000,000,000-plus, to dive a little deeper into the demolition.

A note on methodology: We knew going into the research that there was no way to calculate an exact estimate of the damage in movies like San Andreas, Rampage, and Black Adam (how do you price a 5,000 year-old statue that’s the size of a skyscraper?). That being said, we took exhaustive notes, then compared the damage to modern-day natural disasters, and researched the prices of vehicles, drywall, yachts, plexiglass windows, and more. When it came to movies like The Scorpion King and Hercules, which destroy fictional historic artifacts, we used online resources to help guide our estimates. We also chose not to include the nuclear attacks featured during the opening of Southland Tales because most of the property destruction is off screen.

Total Damage Bill: $12,561,274,968,000.

Most Destructive Movie: San Andreas (at least $10,000,000,000,000). The western seaboard (plus Nevada and Arizona) of the United States is rocked by earthquakes — cities, power grids, and more crumble.

Least Destructive Movie: Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle ($18,000 in virtual world dollars). The world is virtual, which keeps the destruction cost low.

Most Destructive Moment: G.I. Joe: Retaliation ($2,000,000,000,000-plus). London is destroyed, which adds up.

Category 1 ($1 – $1,000,000)

Tomatometer Average: 54.25%
Average Property Damage Per Movie: $204,750
Average International Box Office: $225,079,753

Johnson’s category 1 films don’t have the highest Tomatometer or worldwide box office averages, but as a collective whole, this is the strongest category when it comes to performances. It’s subjective, but The Rundown, Pain and Gain, Snitch, Central Intelligence, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle all feature Johnson going out of his comfort zone — and turning in career-best performances. Whether he’s playing a drug-addled maniac who destroys hair salons (Pain and Gain), or a video game avatar who looks like Johnson, but is actually a neurotic teenager (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle), he embraces the dark side or leans into silliness.

On the destruction front, there are smashed floor-to-ceiling windows ($10,000) and bullet-ridden cars, but it’s mostly the kind of damage that could be sorted out in a month or two by a competent insurance adjuster.

The less destructive movies in this category made less money at the box office on average than their more destructive peers (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle being a mammoth outlier), which is understandable considering that two are R-rated and six are original properties that don’t have the name value of a prequel, remake, reboot, or sequel.

Quick Note: We didn’t include The Smashing Machine (2025) in the dataset, but Johnson does some rock-solid work. An added bonus is that on top of Johnson smashing opponents, he obliterates a door in his house. Bonus!

Category 2 ($1,000,000 – $100,000,000)

Tomatometer Average: 51%
Average Property Damage Per Movie: $24,890,909
Average International Box Office: $290,672,524

A great example of Johnson bringing property destruction with him is when he joined the Furious family as Luke Hobbs. His sweaty presence upped the franchise’s destruction game accordingly: Fast Five has more property destruction than the four previous Fast movies combined ($20,000,000 compared to an estimated $7,000,000). It kicks off early: Our first glimpse of Hobbs in action sees him kicking in a door and exploding through a glass window ($500 in door and window repairs) to give Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) the scare of his life. By the end of the movie, he helps the Fast family steal a 10-ton bank vault that decimates Brazilian streets and causes the bulk of the movie’s $20 million in property destruction.

Johnson’s presence in Race to Witch Mountain, Baywatch, and Jungle Cruise notched up their movie damage as well. We don’t remember any German submarines surfacing during the Jungle Cruise ride, but they most certainly do in the film — and they blow up a fleet of boats.

Most of the films in this set confine the majority of their damage to one or two scenes. The Scorpion King and Hercules, for instance, save their best damage for last, when we see sections of temples destroyed during climatic battles ($30 and $50 million, respectively).

Category 3 ($100,000,000 – $1,000,000,000)

Tomatometer Average: 76%
Average Property Damage Per Movie: $250,000,000
Average International Box Office: $1,123,260,000

Fast & Furious 6 (2013) | Furious 7 (2015)

Furious 7 is Johnson’s highest rated movie on the Tomatometer (Certified Fresh at 81%) and features his wildest moment of property destruction: Hobbs is in the hospital when he realizes his team needs help, and so he literally explodes out of his arm cast by flexing his bicep and steals an ambulance; he then perfectly times his drive off an overpass and crashes the vehicle into a drone ($8.5 million for the drone, remaining missiles, ambulance, and property). He survives without a scratch — which saves on medical costs — and then proceeds to rip off the drone’s massive Gatling gun and shoot ($2,000 in bullets) an enemy helicopter. It blows up when he hits grenades that were attached to it ($20 million for helicopter; $100,000 to remove the burning debris).

This is the exact level of constant property destruction we want from Dwayne Johnson, according to the critics: These two films have his highest Popcornmeter average and his highest Tomatometer average. It’s noteworthy that both feature destruction grounded in the real world, with machines and guns and no overgrown beasts or natural disasters in sight.

Category 4 ($1,000,000,000 – $100,000,000,000)

Tomatometer Average: 46.4%
Average Property Damage Per Movie: $9,583,300,000
Average International Box Office: $541,388,160

Doom (2005) | Southland Tales (2006) | The Fate of the Furious (2017) | Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw (2019) | Black Adam (2022)

Since 2015, Johnson has turned up the destructionmeter by orders of magnitude. The Fate of The Furious, Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw, and Black Adam feature widespread and constant property destruction, including a nuclear submarine exploding ($2.5 billion), obliterated mining operations ($20 billion), and dozens of walls being destroyed because Johnson hates doors ($$$$$).

The Fate of the Furious, Hobbs and Shaw, and Black Adam feature peak “Alpha” Johnson performances. In other words, his characters are much more powerful than his character in Walking Tall, who had a hard time dispatching a villainous casino owner during their final fight. In Black Adam, he’s a cranky anti-hero who destroys mining facilities, temples, and enemy combatants with ease. In The Fate of the Furious, he pushes away a torpedo like it’s a pretzel stick, and the fact that his arms aren’t ripped off during the finale of Hobbs and Shaw proves he’s more than human.

Doom and Southland Tales don’t feature many scenes of destruction, but when they do, they go hard. In Doom, a Mars research facility is blown to smithereens ($50 billion), and in Southland Tales a mega-zeppelin the size of a cruise liner meets its end ($2 billion).

Category 5 ($100,000,000,000 and Over)

Tomatometer Average: 42.6%
Average Property Damage Per Movie: $4,166,000,000,000
Average International Box Office: $426,092,918

G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) | San Andreas (2015) | Rampage (2018)

Between 2013 and 2018, Dwayne Johnson entered the “let’s destroy everything” phase of his career. During this period, his films racked up $12.5 trillion worth of damages, which makes up 99% of the total damages throughout his career. Audiences could smell the property destruction stew he was cooking from miles away, and nobody on the planet was surprised when it was announced that he’d be starring in a film adaptation of the video game Rampage — which is centered around monsters demolishing skyscrapers. Whether it was London being leveled in G.I. Joe Retaliation or the destruction of California in San Andreas, no amount of destruction was too small or unnecessary. Did London need to blow up? Nope. Did a $150 billion space station have to explode in the opening of Rampage? Nope. Did the entirety of California need to burn so Johnson’s character could patch things up with his ex-wife? Nope. However, these movies made a lot of money and proved audiences all over the world loved watching stuff blow up around him — or watching him blow stuff up himself.

The Final Tally

When Johnson is involved in about $250 million worth of damage, critics like what they see and audiences show up to give him all of their money – Category 3 had the highest average Tomatometer and also the highest average box office. The category also happens to be made up purely of films from the Fast and Furious franchise, so success might come down less to how many buildings crumble in a Dwayne Johnson movie, and more to the testosterone-fueled series’ popularity with critics and audiences. What’s next for Johnson and his city-slamming career? This week, he stars in the live-action remake of Disney’s Moana, which likely won’t crack Category 2 on this list, but he’s also got Jumanji: Open World coming in December, as well as the latest Fast and Furious movie, Fast Forever, in 2028, and he just signed on to star in a new film about a Las Vegas motorcycle stuntman diagnosed with dementia, so… We can safely say his destructive days are far from over.

Need an itemized list of DwayJo’s 10 biggest destruction moments? Look no further:

$2 trillion: G.I. Joe: Retaliation: London is destroyed. We put this at No. 1 because not much can be salvaged.

$1 trillion: San Andreas: Los Angeles destroyed by earthquake! The 2011 earthquake in Japan caused $300 billion in damage. No skyscrapers fell in that tragedy, and it happened 231 miles outside of Tokyo. The damage bill for Los Angeles was adjusted upward accordingly.

$950 billion: San Andreas – San Francisco destroyed by earthquake!

$945 billion: San Andreas – Tsunami wipes out the rest of San Francisco. SF was wrecked during the earthquake, but the tsunami finished everything off.

$150 billion: Rampage – The Athena 1 space station blows up!

$20 billion: Black Adam – The Al Hadidiyah Mine is destroyed.

$15 billion: Rampage – The Energyne skyscraper (Willis Tower) in Chicago falls. The building falls onto another, damaging other buildings, bridges, roads, and cars.

$10 billion: Doom – Mars facility gets hit with a BFG-esque grenade.

$10 billion: Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw – Eteon’s secret dark tech laboratory is leveled. The death factory spans three square miles and is loaded with state-of-the-art technology.

$5 billion: Skyscraper – The entirety of the $6.5 billion skyscraper dubbed “The Pearl” isn’t destroyed, but the damage done to the top 129 floors is astronomical. Toss in all the technology that’s burnt to a crisp and the price tag will be in the billions.

Our five favorite destructive moments:

5. The Rundown – During the climactic battle of Peter Berg’s The Rundown, Johnson jumps across a street so he can shoulder tackle an enemy fortification. Typically when people jump off of objects, their body mass (and gravity) pulls them to the ground. Not this time. Johnson stays parallel with the ground for 15-ish feet on his way to knocking out a concrete pole. It’s insane, and we love it.

4. Fast Five – To prepare for the role of Luke Hobbs in Fast Five, Johnson gained 30 pounds by working out constantly and eating all the chicken in the United States. The hard work and sweat paid off as Johnson became an immediate physical threat for Vin Diesel, and his best moment came during a chase through the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. As Diesel’s character is running atop the roofs of the favelas, Johnson explodes through a window and looks awesome doing it. It was at this moment that we knew he would become one of the biggest A-list (rock)stars on the planet. Johnson has never looked bigger, tougher, sweatier or stronger.

3. Pain & Gain – Johnson’s performance as a drug-addled criminal in the Michael Bay-directed Pain & Gain is beautifully unhinged (and will never happen again). He grills hands on charcoal grills, gets his toe shot off, and uses a hood dryer to knock out a cop who attempts to arrest him in a Miami hair salon. The hair salon fight is brief, but watching Johnson use the objects around him (like a giant version of Jackie Chan) to escape arrest never gets old.

2. Furious 7 – When Johnson saves the day, he does it with style. In one of the greatest moments of property destruction ever — one we referenced earlier here — Johnson drives a stolen ambulance off an overpass and onto a military drone to save Michelle Rodriguez’s character from certain death. It’s amazing. However, have you ever thought about the timing needed to do what Johnson does in this scene? He needs to know how fast the drone is going, and then he has to time it with the speed of the ambulance and the slowdown that comes when colliding through a concrete barrier wall. Naturally, Johnson is so good at destroying things that he instinctively understands the physics of chaos.

1. The Other Guys – “Aim for the bushes.” With these immortal words, Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson jump off the roof of a highrise expecting nearby shrubbery to soften their fall. The problem is, there are no bushes in sight, so the two supercops meet their end on a concrete sidewalk that will need to be replaced once their bodies are removed. The moment is unexpected, hilarious and almost as good as Jackson’s surprise death in the Deep Blue Sea.

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