Skyscraper (2018)

Skyscraper is a 2018 American action thriller film written, produced, and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber. The film stars Dwayne Johnson in the lead role, with Neve Campbell, Chin Han, Roland Møller, Noah Taylor, Byron Mann, Pablo Schreiber, and Hannah Quinlivan in supporting roles. In the film, Will Sawyer, a former FBI agent, must rescue his family from a newly built Hong Kong skyscraper, the tallest in the world, after terrorists set the building on fire in an attempt to extort the property developer. The film is the second collaboration between Thurber and Johnson, following Central Intelligence (2016). Development started in May 2016 when Legendary Entertainment won the bidding war for a Chinese-set action adventure film. Johnson was cast to play the lead, while Thurber was attached as the film's scriptwriter, director and producer, with Flynn producing the film through his Flynn Picture Company, alongside Johnson's Seven Bucks Productions and Universal Pictures handling distribution rights. Filming began in August 2017 in Vancouver, with location shooting in Hong Kong. Skyscraper premiered in Beijing on July 1, 2018, and was released in the United States on July 13, 2018. It grossed $304 million worldwide against a budget of $125 million. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised Johnson's performance and the film's suspenseful scenes, but criticized the story and deemed it too similar to other films, including The Towering Inferno (1974) and Die Hard (1988).