Dwayne Johnson Joins A24 Psychological Thriller Breakthrough

Having lit up the ring as WWE superstar The Rock, and dominated the box office in blockbuster fare like Moana, Jumanji, and the Fast & Furious franchise over the last decade, it looks like Dwayne Johnson is ready to fully enter his thespian era. And with Benny Safdie’s A24 MMA biopic The Smashing Machine and a Martin Scorsese Hawaiian crime movie already lined up, Johnson has just added another eye-catching project to his increasingly stacked card. Per Deadline‘s reporting, the wrestler-turned-actor is reteaming with A24 on Breakthrough, an intense sounding original psychological thriller.

Penned by emerging talent Zeke Goodman — whose credits include Prime Video’s I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions reboots — and set in early noughties SoCal, Breakthrough reportedly centres around the relationship that forms between an alienated juvenile man and a motivational guru whose methodology and morality are both questionable. Further plot details remain under wraps for now, but the plan is for Johnson to play the guru with a shadowy side. Per Deadline, the search for the movie’s lead and the rest of the ensemble is ongoing at this point, and the project is still looking for a director.

In the last year, Johnson has returned to the squared circle and tapped into a darker side as WWE’s ‘Final Boss’, pulling off a successful heel turn with a run of surprisingly brutal promos in the run-up to last year’s WrestleMania that blurred the lines between the multi-hyphenate’s corporate, professional, and private personae. It’ll be compelling then to see how this newly tapped vein for Johnson carries over into his cinematic endeavours. Breakthrough may be a ways off yet, and the Marty mob movie, too, but we’ll get our first smell of what The Rock’s been cooking when The Smashing Machine powerhouses its way into cinemas later this year. The Dwayne Johnson Oscar trail begins here!