Doom (film)

Lore & Background

The film is set in 2026, when a wormhole portal called the Ark is discovered beneath the Nevada desert, leading to an ancient city on Mars. Twenty years later, the 85 personnel at the Union Aerospace Corporation research facility on Mars are attacked by an unknown assailant. A squad of eight marines, including Sgt. Asher "Sarge" Mahonin and John "Reaper" Grimm, is sent to the facility on a search-and-destroy mission, with UAC concerned only about retrieving computer data from their experiments. The marines discover that UAC was experimenting on humans using an extra Martian Chromosome (C24) harvested from ancient skeletons, which caused the outbreak of mutated creatures.

Reader's Guide

Doom was developed after Hollywood gained interest in a live-action adaptation following the success of Doom II. Universal Pictures acquired the rights after Warner Bros. failed to move the project into production. The script loosely adapted elements from Doom 3, and early drafts included creatures like the Cacodemon and Arch-Vile but were cut for time and budget. Dwayne Johnson turned down the lead role of John Grimm in favor of playing Sarge. The film's first-person shooter sequence was entirely directed by visual effects supervisor Jon Farhat and filmed in 14 days after three months of planning. The film was a box office bomb, grossing $58.7 million worldwide against a $60–70 million budget, and received negative reviews. In 2019, Universal released a direct-to-video sequel titled Doom: Annihilation.

Did You Know?

• The film's first-person shooter sequence was filmed in 14 days after a three-month planning period.
• The creature effects were created by Stan Winston Studios, supervised by John Rosengrant.
• The film includes 350 visual effects shots, shared between Framestore and Double Negative.