Zachary Levi attends the World Premiere of ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ in Westwood, CA. Photo: Eric Charbonneau.
Zachary Levi opens up about the superhero film ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ and his future with the franchise. In an interview with The FilmUp Podcast, the actor acknowledges the criticism from movie critics, “I don’t know what the future holds for it all because, unfortunately, the second movie was not well received,” Levi says of the low critics’ score, “The audience score is still quite good, but the critics’ score was very oddly and perplexingly low, and people were insanely unkind.”
Currently, ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ stands at 49% from critics on Rotten Tomoates and an audience score of 86%. For comparison, the 2019 ‘Shazam!’ is certified Fresh on the aggregator site, with a 90% critics’ score and 82% audience score. The film became available on digital less than a month after its theatrical release, grossing $133 million worldwide. The production budget for ‘ Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ was $125 million.
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The actor eludes to reasons why the sequel did not perform as well as its predecessor:
“I think even just the world, from the first movie to the second movie, the world has shifted so much. Social media has shifted so much. Hate, online hate and haters and trolls, and factions and all that has just gotten more galvanized in its toxicity. I think there are people who genuinely, unfortunately, want to destroy certain projects because they don’t like them, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like other people involved in them or whatever.”
Levi questions whether or not he’ll be able to return as Shazam in the new DCU but remains hopeful, “I have no idea where we go from here. I just hope that or believe that history will show… it will be one of those things that people will go back, people will watch ‘Fury of the Gods’ on home streaming or on a plane or whatever, and it will be this movie that they heard so much s**t about and then they will be like, ‘Well, wait a minute.’ ”
Zachary Levi is not the only actor with an uncertain future in the DCU. Fellow actors who held titular characters such as Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, and Dwayne Johnson are unlikely to return to reprise their roles. While certain superheroes have made cameo appearances in recent films such as ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ and ‘The Flash’ it doesn’t cement their return to the DCU since its revamp. We have yet to see a brand-new movie released under the reign of James Gunn and Peter Safran, other than what has been laid out in the initial roadmap promising ‘Superman: Legacy,’ ‘Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,’ ‘Brave and the Bold,’ ‘Swamp Thing,’ and ‘The Authority.’
James Gunn and fellow DC Studios CEO Peter Safran have been teasing for a while what we can expect from the movies, shows and video games that will form part of their planned 8-10 year reboot of the DC onscreen universe. Gunn took to twitter today to make the initial announcement, one which includes new versions of Batman, Superman, Supergirl, Green Lantern and more.
Gunn confirmed that the existing DC movies still to be released––‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods,’ ‘The Flash’, ‘Blue Beetle’ and ‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom’––are all still on track for release, with the Flash outing and its universe-rebooting nature key to helping to usher in the new shows and movies.
Those films will then lead into what Gunn and Safran are calling ‘Gods and Monsters’, which is a major part (but not all) of the first “Chapter” in their plans. “The one thing that we can promise is that everything from our first project forward will be canon and will be connected,” says Gunn. “We’re using some actors from the past, we’re not using other actors from the past, but everything from that moment forward will be connected and consistent.” It’ll be a mix of TV (both animated and live action) and movies, with games tying in as needed.
Writer, director, co-chairmen and co-CEO of DC Studios, James Gunn. Photo courtesy of James Gunn’s Twitter account.
“DC has had great individual movies over the years, but we think that what the audience really appreciates and needs is a connected universe,” adds Safran. “It minimizes audience confusion and it maximizes their connectivity to it across all the platforms.”
Gunn talked up 10 initial titles. For TV, first up will be the animated ‘Creature Commandos’, which looks to include the likes of Weasel (as seen in Gunn’s move ‘The Suicide Squad’). Gunn has written the first batch of episodes and the plan is for characters to cross between animated and live-action, and for the same actor to both voice and play the role where possible.
There was also confirmation of ‘Peacemaker’ spin-off series ‘Waller’, with Viola Davis reprising her role as the tough wrangler of Task Force X, interacting with some characters from ‘Peacemaker’ (and one from ‘Creature Commandos’). That show will be overseen by Christal Henry, who was a writer on the TV’s ‘Watchmen,’ and Jeremy Carver who created ‘Doom Patrol’. The series will sit between the first and second seasons of ‘Peacemaker’.
Viola Davis as Amanda Waller in 2016’s ‘Suicide Squad.’
Those are what Gunn is calling an amuse bouche for the main DCU launch, which will officially start via one of DC’s heavy hitters: Superman. ‘Superman: Legacy’. As he’s previously said, Gunn is writing the new take on the hero, and there is the hope he’ll also direct (though that hasn’t been confirmed yet). And it has a locked in release date of July 11th, 2025. “With our stories, we want to take it away from good guy vs. bad guy,” Gunn says. “There are really good—almost saintly—people and Superman is among them. There are really terrible villains like Gorilla Grodd or the Joker. And then there’s everybody in between them, so there are all these shades of gray which allow us to tell complex stories.”
That will be followed by ‘Lanterns’, which is the latest iteration of the series that has been in development at HBO Max for a while now. It’ll be an Earth-set series featuring Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart (with others popping up) and is described as ‘True Detective’ with a “terrifying mystery” that ties into the wider universe.
On the movie front again, ‘The Authority’ will utilize characters from the WildStorm Comics Imprint that DC bought. Says Gunn, “It’s a very different kind of superhero story. They are basically good-intentioned, but they think that the world is completely broken and the only way to fix it is to take things into their own hands, whether that means killing people, destroying heads of state, changing governments—basically, whatever they want to do to make the world better. We’ll see how that journey goes for them.”
Wonder Woman fans are getting ‘Paradise Lost,’ a show set on Themyscira, the birthplace of Princess Diana, and described as ‘Game Of Thrones’ with the Amazons. “It’s an origin story of how this society of women came about. What does it mean? What are their politics like? What are their rules? Who’s in charge? What are the games that they play with each other to get to the top?,” Gunn enthuses. “I think it’s really exciting.” It’s set before Diana is born.
DC Comics’ Damian Wayne/Robin. Photo courtesy of DC.com.
Batman will be all new in the main DCU via movie ‘The Brave And The Bold’, adapting Grant Morrison‘s run, and featuring yet another Bruce Wayne who tries to keep his son, Damien Wayne, in line as Robin. This will launch the “Bat-family” into the movie universe.
‘Booster Gold’ is touted as an HBO series. “I think of it as basically the story of a superhero’s imposter syndrome,” says Gunn. “How do you deal with that? It follows how he tries to use this future technology to be loved by the people of today and what is really at the base of that. It’s a character story that’s going to be a very different type of show, and we’re talking to an actor about it now.”
‘Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow’ will be a big-scale sci-fi film based on Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s comic run. It features a “darker, harsher” version of Kara Zor-El raised on a surviving chunk of Krypton who sees everyone around her die.
DC Comics’ Supergirl from writer Tom King’s ‘Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow.’ Photo courtesy of DC.com.
Finally, a new ‘Swamp Thing’ movie will be a horror-inflected origin story for the creature, one that still intersects with the rest of the DCU.
What, then, does all this mean for the likes of Matt Reeves’ ‘Batman‘ or Todd Phillips’ ‘Joker’ sequel? They will fall under the umbrella title ‘Elseworlds’. “The bar for an Elseworlds tale is going to be higher than the bar for a movie within the DCU,” says Gunn. “Not that we’re not always going to have a high bar, but it’s got to be something really special for us to tell that story outside of our regular continuity and to spend the money to make it.”
“We are actually developing a few other things as well, but for one reason or another, we can’t say them,” Gunn concludes. This is the first batch of stuff, but there may be a couple of surprises to come.”
It’s certainly an ambitious plan. Now we wait and see whether it truly comes to fruition––as previous DC regimes have made bold statements, but haven’t always lasted to see their ideas realized…
DC Comics’ Booster Gold. Photo courtesy of DC.com.
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