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Dwayne Johnson uncontrollably sobs as ‘The Smashing Machine’ gets fifteen-minute Venice standing ovation and generates Oscar buzz
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- Authors
- Rebecca Rubin,Ramin Setoodeh,Ellise Shafer
- Published
- Sep 1 2025
- Word count
- 331 words
Flashback to Brendan Fraser going viral for crying during The Whale's premiere also at Venice.
The film itself is also pretty well received which is more than The Whale was able to say for itself. I don't know how this is gonna go Oscar-wise. Johnson and Fraser, I suppose have similar backgrounds. They were always more "popcorn" actors and were not necessarily treated seriously until their latest film. Although I do think what made Fraser's narrative more powerful was that he was blacklisted from Hollywood due to him coming out against a Hollywood insider that groped him. And also how his body was destroyed from making The Mummy films. But the roles are similar in that they are meta in their casting and are basically tailor made for the leads.
I am not an Oscar voter*, but I find it easier to get behind a FYC campaign about 'former heart throb star has amazing comeback after struggles', as opposed to 'known asshole finally books good role'.
I don't know Dwayne Johnson personally, but I've read too many stories of him being rude, arrogant, and grinding filming days to a halt with his difficult personality to dismiss them as completely baseless. I am not even in the entertainment industry and I've heard credible first-hand stories from people who've had to work with him.
I fully accept that this is a narrow and kinda mean-spirited opinion, I've just been burned too many times by 'they're just like you or I!' Hollywood campaigns.
*I imagine if I was an Oscar voter, I'd probably get a lot of schadenfreude out of not voting for an asshole in my industry, especially if I'd worked with him or had friends impacted by his BS.
Standing and clapping for films is such a weird thing.
Imagine standing and clapping your hands for 15 minutes because you liked something. Anything. I can't.
I mean it’s at a film festival where they know the film makers are in the room with them. I do find it weird when people clap at my local theatre where nobody is there to receive the praise, but this seems extremely normal in context.
Idk this seems pretty normal to me. I don’t quite understand the confusion.
A fifteen minute standing ovation is not normal. It reminds me of the stories about the applause for Stalin's speeches where everyone was afraid to stop clapping.
It’s not normal, but that’s why it’s in the title: it’s special.
It’s not hard to imagine. It’s not like everyone is clapping as hard as they can. Sometimes it’s just awkward to figure out when to stop. No one wants to be the guy who stops first, so they all try to watch other people as a signal, and it ends up being recursive.
It's sort of normal at some film festivals, namely Cannes. There's some drama in the filmmaking and critique communities about that culture spreading, to nobody's particular delight. I am probably wrong, but I think last year it had begun to happen more at Venice, and that's how I learned about the drama.
It's kind of hard to gauge, with that in mind. Cannes has had this tradition for a long enough time that people in the trade have an internal conversion factor from Cannes applause to normal applause. Vaguely as I recall, <5 minutes of ovation means "crickets", <10 minutes means "normal applause", <20 means "standing ovation for a minute or so", so on.
Someone in the industry, please correct me. I'm too distant from it to even know where to verify my knowledge.
It's been tradition in concerts and stage productions for hundreds of years, it makes sense that the practice would transfer to new mediums.
Making a play, musical production, or film from beginning to end and having it come out coherent, let alone meaningful and impactful, is a pretty major achievement for just about anyone involved.
Even just being in the room sounds like it'd be awful, it's like a caricature of genuine enthusiasm. I wonder how this tradition even started.
Hm, GDT's Frankenstein also apparently got a 15-minute standing ovation too
Standing ovations of that length are a somewhat common occurrence at larger film festivals.
My arms are sore just thinking about it.
The Scorpion King cast is finally getting recognized!
Seriously though, 15 minutes is a bit excessive. It makes sense for stage plays because actors will come out and do flowers and bows and whatever and everyone is just hyped from having performed and sometimes out of breath/winded so its an energy thing.
Seems strange in a movie setting, dude's already spent the money he got paid on the cocaine and hookers long ago, let alone felt the excitement of being part of the thing. A little late for an ovation that long, too performative and self congratulatory to me.
It's definitely performative, but it's just a weird custom at certain film festivals. Media usually report on the length of these standing clap-alongs and use it to predict which films will have success in awards season. And those predictions tend to not be far off, because these viewings are full of industry insiders and critics, the kinds of people who vote for awards. I don't see how it's self-congratulatory though. While some parts of the audience will be people involved in the production of the film, the majority will be critics, media, other film industry people. They're not clapping for themselves.
I guess i dont see a line between critics/film industry people and the people directly tied to the making of the film. Its all one big club and i cant help but feel like theyre not just clapping for the movie, but also for their ability to "discern" what makes a good movie. By providing the ovation for that long theyre aware of the publicity they are creating and you could say, are involving themselves in the creative process/clapping for themselves. Queue the "I was there during the standing ovation for the Smashing Machine" stories.
I am aware it is a very roundabout thought process but it's my explanation for why i wrote self congratulatory.
I have quite a deep-seeded hatred for Johnson due to his toxic-manhandling of several projects. It's starting to get around just how badly he tried to inject himself into the DCU, but the guy overall has just been a controlling force on every group he touches.
I doubt that this is something he will ever grow out of, but i hope doing a role where he actually has to act, where he gets recognized for the effort put in, knocks some sense into him. He's been phoning it in for so long that maybe he'll get a taste of not playing flawless main character #4 and actually enjoy it. And with that, maybe not need to drive every project he touches into the ground because he wants to be a flawless stereotype. I sincerely would like to see him come to his senses.
That hope is why I'm excited for this movie, at least a bit. For all his use of surrealism, Benny Safdie is a pretty serious director, but one who doesn't seem to take himself too seriously. If any "type" can knock some artistic ambition into a jaded veteran of popcorn flicks like Johnson, that one can.