Emma Stone's Second Movie Was A Major Box Office Flop Featuring An Office Star

Emma Stone hit the ground at a full sprint with her first feature performance in "Superbad." She was hilarious, down to earth, and utterly winning as Jules, the girl Seth (Jonah Hill) is crushing on (and who sends our hormone-addled heroes on a quest to procure alcohol). "Superbad" is perfectly cast front to back, but while Christopher Mintz-Plasse was the big discovery as McLovin (and rightfully so), Stone had that ineffable "it" factor. Her day would come.

Everyone expected great things from Emma Stone, but did anyone see her becoming the Millennial Meryl Streep? Stone's only 37, and she's already been nominated for five acting Oscars and two for Best Picture (as the producer of "Poor Things" and "Bugonia"). Stone won Best Actress for her performances in "La La Land" and "Poor Things," and unless she pulls a Liam Neeson and starts making action movies, there will be more wins because the membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences adores her.

Before she established herself as perennial Oscar contender with "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)," Stone slugged it in a series of serviceable studio flicks that were generally watchable due to her presence ("Zombieland" excepted). But one film she couldn't save was "The Rocker," an underdog rock-and-roll comedy that slammed the nail through the coffin of Rainn Wilson's viability as a leading man.

Written by the talented wife-and-husband duo of Maya Forbes and Wallace Wolodarsky (who, respectively, wrote all-time great episodes of "The Larry Sanders Show" and "The Simpsons"), "The Rocker" is about a drummer who gets jettisoned by his rock band when they get signed to a major label. 20 years after getting kicked off the gravy train, the drummer envisages a comeback by aiding his nephew's high-school garage band after their beat-keeper becomes a troublemaker. Had director Peter Cattaneo applied the grounded approach he brought to the sleeper male-stripper smash "The Full Monty," "The Rocker" might've been wonderful.

Casting Rainn Wilson as the washed-up drummer killed this movie. Wilson was brilliantly creepy in NBC's "The Office," but aside from James Gunn's psycho-superhero riff "Super," which harnessed his alarmingly off-kilter energy, he's proven time and again that he is not a star. He throws "The Rocker" off its kind-hearted axis. He's doing Rainn Wilson shtick, which is alienating. Audiences can't root for a guy who's so appallingly unrelatable. In only her second film ever, Stone becomes the film's anchor through sheer nascent star power, but she belongs in a better movie with an established movie star. Almost twenty years later, she would've carried this movie.

"The Rocker" grossed $7 million against a $15 million budget. It received mostly negative reviews, but clearly didn't throw a dent into Emma Stone's career. It also spared us a series of Rainn Wilson star vehicles. This film was a blessing.