This Karl Urban Action Movie Only Flopped Because It Was Ahead of Its Time
It could have been a huge financial success if it had been released a few years later.
Karl Urban has had many memorable roles throughout his career, but Billy Butcher from the TV series The Boys definitely stands out among his most memorable recent performances.
The actor seems to be right at home in the bloody R-rated projects and is currently in final negotiations to play Johnny Cage in a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat movie.
This is no surprise, as he already starred in an R-rated movie more than a decade ago, but it seems to have been ahead of its time.
Dredd is a 2012 sci-fi action film based on a 2000 AD comic book series set in a dystopian world of the year 2080.
The Earth has been devastated by a nuclear war, and the remaining humans live in megacities plagued by violent crime, so Judges were created to deal with it.
Each of them is judge, jury and executioner in one person, assessing the severity of a crime and reacting accordingly, going to the length of the death penalty on the spot.
The story follows Judge Dredd ( Urban) working in Mega-City One, where he must storm a giant skyscraper to take on the criminal lord Ma-Ma, portrayed by Lena Headey.
It was the second attempt to adapt the comics to the big screen, the previous one being in 1995 and starring Sylvester Stallone, but the 2012 film was much more faithful to the original in terms of characters (with Dredd never taking off his helmet) and intense, bloody and violent action scenes, leading to an R rating.
The film was praised by both audiences and critics, but unfortunately became a box office flop, falling victim to a terrible marketing campaign that failed to capture the public's interest.
It's a shame, because if it was released a few years later, when R-rated movies began to flourish, it could easily have been in the same league as such great movies as Logan (2017), Deadpool ( 2016) or Joker ( 2019), for which having an R-rating was part of their marketing campaigns, but it seems to have been released way too early.
Still, it is a great movie, and if you like bloody, visceral action, you should definitely check it out.