Warner Brothers announced an ambitious slate of movies based on DC Comics properties. (WB owns DC.) But the franchise is off to a rocky start with fans giving ‘Batman V Superman’ a thumbs down (and hundreds of millions of dollars) and only slightly taking kinder to ‘Suicide Squad’. There has also been behind-the-scenes turmoil on other pictures like ‘The Flash’ which has already lost two directors and with a proposed ‘Cyborg’ movie in jeopardy of either becoming a ‘Teen Titans’ group movie or being scrapped altogether.
It appears that ‘Shazam’, however, is still on track, despite not being connected to either ‘Justice League’ or ‘Suicide Squad’. The film has a release date, April 5, 2019, and a megastar set to headline, Dwayne Johnson, who lobbied to play villain Black Adam. And a script is in the works from Bill Birch, Geoff Johns and Darren Lemke. But since then, it’s been pretty quiet on the ‘Shazam’ front.
And it still is.
But hopefully not for long.
Both Dwayne Johnson and producer Hiram Garcia were very happy after meeting with DC regarding the ‘Shazam!’ project and had to share on social media their excitement.
Producer Hiram Garcia has worked extensively with Johnson, having produced ‘Journey 2: The Mysterious Island’, ‘Hercules’, ‘Furious 7’, ‘San Andreas’ and ‘Central Intelligence’ and the upcoming ‘Baywatch’. He’s also attached to upcoming projects ‘Journey 3’ and ‘4’, ‘Doc Savage’, ‘Big Trouble In Little China’, ‘Jumanji’ and ‘Rampage’. And of course, he is producing ‘Shazam’ as well.
Garcia took to Twitter to announce that he’d just had a meeting with DC Comics regarding the ‘Shazam!’ project and… well, that’s about it. No big announcements, but it appears that something is coming soon.
You can view Garcia’s cryptic tweet below:
Great meeting today at @dccomics talkin’ #Shazam #BlackAdam & more! Big things are coming. Get ready #JustSayTheWord pic.twitter.com/uK1bQ7sx32
— Hiram Garcia (@hhgarcia41) January 11, 2017
Joining in the tease was Johnson who posted this on his Instagram account:
Both posts come just a few weeks after Henry Cavill (Superman) posted a picture on Instagram of himself and Johnson on vacation with some rather teasing hashtags that seem to hint at a Shazam!/Superman (or at least a Black Adam/Superman) mashup.
For many years, the ‘Shazam!’ characters were considered somewhat detached from the larger DC Universe, but in recent years, efforts have been made to integrate them more closely, which has included Shazam joining the Justice League at times, even in the animated movies. And even before that, Black Adam was actually built up as a major DC Universe villain/antihero rather than just being the arch-enemy of Shazam (or Captain Marvel as he was known at that time).
It may make better sense to have Shazam and/or Black Adam appear in a ‘Justice League’ or some other DC movie first, before taking the limelight in a solo film.
Are you looking forward to a ‘Shazam!’ movie? Are you glad that some progress has been made?