Zachary Levi seemingly confirms Dwayne Johnson cut Black Adam cameo for Henry Cavill debacle
Shazam hits back at Black Adam in a feud more interesting than either movie
Aux News Black Adam
The lightning bolt boys are finally fighting.
In yet another sign that this era of the DC cinematic entertainment should’ve ended in 2013, Zachary Levi has seemingly confirmed that Dwayne Johnson nixed Levi’s Black Adam cameo and denied access to Black Adam characters for the latest Shazam. Black Adam can’t be seen fighting a jokey goofball like his canonical nemesis Shazam because, as we’ve noted, it’s the Rock’s dream to punch Superman in the face.
Perhaps the most important (only important?) post-credit sequence in superhero movie history, Black Adam ends with, what else, a phone call from Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) before Henry Cavill’s Superman flies in from the void of space to tell Johnson’s Black Adam, “We should talk.”
However, this was not the original plan. Honestly, it doesn’t seem like much of a plan, outside of a hail Mary to push the WBD brass into giving the Rock a bigger slice of the DC pie. And as we all know, the Rock loves pie. Per The Wrap, initially, Black Adam was to feature a post-credits scene where The Justice Society recruits Shazam. That certainly would’ve made more sense, considering Shazam wears the same shirt as Black Adam, is canonically linked to the character, and was opening a $100 million superhero movie only a few months later. But instead, Black Adam tried to force Hollywood’s hand into letting Johnson punch Superman.
Nevertheless, as he continues his Shazam! Fury Of The Gods apology tour, Levi seemingly confirmed Johnson’s duplicity in this. Responding to an Instagram story that details Johnson’s vetoing Levi’s cameo, the Shazam star commented, “The truth will set you free.”
“The Wrap confirms that in Shazam! Fury Of The Gods, the Justice Society from Black Adam were recruiting Shazam in the post credits,” the post reads. “The Rock denied access and [Shazam! director] David F. Sandberg had to make a last minute decision to add Emilia and John. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson attempted to restructure the DCEU, centering him and Henry Cavill’s Superman. The Rock didn’t allow Zachary Levi to cameo in a post-credit for Black Adam.
To use The Wrap’s verbiage, Johnson further “kneecapped” Shazam! Fury Of The Gods by refusing access to Black Adam characters for the movie. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director David F. Sandberg, using his most diplomatic voice possible, explained how the Fury Of The Gods post-credits scene came together.
So there were supposed to be characters from [Black Adam’s]
Justice Society, but that fell apart three days before we were going to
roll cameras. I was really upset because we had built that abandoned
gas station set, and we could only shoot that scene in that little piece
of forest. I was like, “This is so boring. We need something here.” So
the art department built that whole gas station and brought in some old
cars and things. They made it look really nice with very few resources,
and so I was like, “We have this set and we have the time, so we have to
shoot something here.”
So, Peter Safran, who produced this movie and Peacemaker, made
some calls, and thankfully, Jen Holland and Steve Agee were able to
come by on very short notice. I mean, the scene makes a little less
sense with them. It’s like, “Why are they recruiting for Justice
Society?” but you can kind of see it as they’re working for Amanda
Waller [Viola Davis].
The more time passes, the more that Black Adam post-credit scene reveals itself as the most consequential since Samuel L. Jackson uttered the words “Avengers initiative.” It’s certainly more interesting than hearing fellow theatergoers grumble, “Who’s that,” “What are they from again,” and “I have to watch a TV show, too?”
73 Comments
This chud right here… Can we just send him up on the next Virgin Orbital rocket and mourn him for 20 minutes?
We wouldn’t need to mourn someone like Dwayne Johnson. Also no need to waste rocket fuel. Just throw him in a ditch somewhere and be done with it.
Yeah, I’m kinda thinking Vin Diesel had the Rock figured out.
Maybe they both have each other figured out….
If only we could get Vin, Dwayne, and Levi to star in a Three Amigos remake…
It’s amazing to think that the thing that’s going to ruin the public’s love affair with the Rock is going to be the Black Adam movie.
It’s like Capone going down for tax fraud but much, much dumber.
i think its overblown, if he makes another halfway decent Jumanji movie all will be forgiven
The hierarchy of power in the “mysterious game sucks in real people” genre is about to change
I mean it’s hard for me to get too upset with him for this considering DC has been hot garbage for years not and both Jumanji movies are better than pretty much anything DC put out this decade. If WB had been competently run he wouldn’t have been able to get away with this shit
For me, it’s less ‘forgive’ than I thought Johnson was bland, but smart. Turns out he’s bland and dumb instead.
It’s so fascinating to me. The whole situation really laid bare what a galactic ego he’s gotten with his “Advance the Brand” mentality the past half decade or so. He’s going to get pulled right back into it all with this bait too. He can’t resist whenever it’s mentioned.
I’ll just watch jungle cruise one more time and all will be forgiven.
Between Will Smith and the Rock, 2022 was a revealing year for carefully brand-managed nice guy personas.
Plus Zachary Levi turning out to be an antivax nutter. You may be onto something here…
I’ve grown tired of The Rocks shtick for a few years now so that’s fine by me. If he tones it down a bit and goes back to making films like The Rundown, Be Cool, and Walking Tall again, who knows.
Yea it’s overdue. The Rock’s presence is the most consistent indicator of a bad movie this side of Uwe Boll or Will Smith.
honestly, it’s miraculous he was able to build the career he was able to, but the problem is he came up in the ‘hey everyone get to know the real me on social media!’ era and now the current era is…different.
I was over him years ago. I followed him on Instagram because, you know, he seemed fun or whatever. But every post was either about his tequila or about his bodybuilding (honestly, how does he even wipe his butt?), and he was just super boring and, well, full of himself. I know it’s Instagram, and truthfully I never like to criticize someone for loving themselves, because if you don’t love yourself who else will? But he really, really loves himself. He drank too much of his own kool-aid.
precisely my point! in 2013 it was interesting and neat to see real-life updates from celebrities (they’re just like us!) but 10 years later it simply isn’t, and frankly there isn’t much crossover between someone with a big social media following and that translating to box office, despite the trades insisting on it when they do their box office rundowns.
True, there are a few other celebrities I follow, and I don’t find their content offensively boring enough to unfollow, but I find myself just scrolling past without looking. Gabrielle Union, Kristen Bell… those are the only two I can think of that I still follow, but generally I don’t read their posts. I don’t care about your skincare routine, and I don’t care what you did on your birthday or whatever. Gabrielle Union does post cute photos of her daughter, though, and I like that. Oh! I did unfollow Beyonce, of all people. She was boring. Literally just pictures of herself and nothing else. Which I get is what Instagram was initially for, but it’s not interesting to me.
If he’d just let this movie rollout like normal he could probably let the bad press roll off his gigantic shoulders. It was all that talk of it being a labor of love, respecting Black Adam’s legacy, blah blah blah… that set him up to fail even more imo.
It always seemed strange that Black Adam wasn’t going to be in the second Shazaam movie. I get that they wanted to give Black Adam his own movie to start, but they probably could’ve planned in advance to accommodate that in the schedule. The first Shazaam was well-received, but it felt like they would need to spice things up for a sequel (such as introducing the character’s most popular foe). I guess we see why that didn’t pan out: Shazaam’s not a big enough character for The Rock… tracking too low in the Q-Ratings or whatever other metrics this guy uses to pick his roles. I’m kind of wondering if it was ever on the table of discussed at all of pitting the two together, or if Dwayne was pretty much gung-ho about going after Superman the whole time.
It’s an interesting question simply for how long it took Black Adam to get made. (Plans for it pre-date Shazam, I believe.) I can see a situation where Superman was always the White Whale, but I can also see a situation were it became a change-up after DC started getting desperate.In that latter scenario, desperation breeds creative differences between two movies. Considering The Rock’s vision for Black Adam, he likely took one look at Zachary Levi’s goofy inflated suit, and went, “What’s Henry Cavill’s number again?”
I would swear that Dwayne was pounding the Black Adam drum around the same time we were all wondering “Marvel leveraged the future of their company to produce their own movies, and they’re starting with Iron Man? I don’t know if that’s going to pan out the way they hoped…”
“I get that they wanted to give Black Adam his own movie to start’
I don’t. It makes absolutely no sense.
giving Black Adam his own movie in the 1st place was a terrible idea. how many times is Hollywood going to do the whole ‘evil Superman’ thing? we’ve already had Zod, plus Justice League, plus that Gunn movie with the evil Superman kid, plus the Boys. Enough already
Plus superman 3.
plus the Hoechlin-Supes-on-Routh-Supes from Crisis.
Shazaam? Ok, but only if the extra “a” is for…oh, let’s say Apollo. He wasn’t just the sun god, but the god of music too. So Shazaam can play any musical instrument perfectly, because magic.
The behind-the-scenes drama at Warner Bros/DC is honestly more interesting than some of their recent movies.
Came here to say this.
Yes, and the BTS isn’t that interesting. The post credit scenes of two mediocre movies that were never going to lead to anything? It reminds me of scenes about the making of the movie in The Boys. Funny, but inconsequential.
The subheading of this article says the same thing!
The sex for roles scandal with Hamada and Neil Marshall’s girlfriend were involved in would make a decent Adam McKay comedy drama, or an awesome Lifetime trashy movie.
That was Kevin Tsujihara, not Walter Hamada…
Thanks, my mistake
The Ezra Hall movie has some legs. But who we get to play the main role?
It is a bit ironic that among the weakest parts of each film were the lack of a clear, compelling, worthy antagonist for the lead to face off against. Combining the two films into one would make each character more interesting and give them less muddy storylines.
Kind of impressive that The Rock managed to sabotage his own movie and someone else’s at the same time.
I read a pitch for the Black Adam film somewhere: it starts off as a Rock vehicle where he’s supposedly the hero, only for Shazam to appear midway through to fight him and thus reveal that Adam is actually the bad guy.Execution is everything, obviously, but I think it could’ve been an interesting take that would give justice to the comic characters’ egomania and also preserved some of The Rock’s brand for marketing and shit.
True or not, it’s never going to be a good look to go on social media and go all in on all the reasons your movie didn’t perform well especially a week after the release.
Levi has been awfully finger-pointy since the release, hasn’t he? Methinks someone other than The Rock’s ego is damaged as well.
Plus Shazam kind of has the out of “hey, DC decided to reboot and we’re just lucky we didn’t get the Batgirl treatment…” without casting greater blame. IDK, it’s a choice from a guy who has decided to use social media to show many questionable opinions just making himself less likable.
Treating Shazam exactly the way Black Adam would
“Black Adam can’t be seen fighting a jokey goofball like his canonical nemesis Shazam”.Assuming this is the Rock’s reasoning, it’s a bad opinion and he should feel bad. For Shazam, Black Adam is a cautionary tale, a clear image of what his powers can do in the wrong hands. For Black Adam, Shazam’s goofiness can be read either as a mockery of his own sense of godhood, or a reminder of everything he can never be.
The Rock’s self-seriousness here is insane to me because the man’s actually worthwhile wrestling career was built on getting his ass beat. Like sure, he got over due to his mic skills and charisma, but a large part of it was that said charisma made him unafraid to look like the geek – he could always just rebuild himself next night by verbally eviscerating someone. Dude sold his ass off for The Hurricane, a way goofier superhero character than Shazam. You’d think he’d understand that he can do the same as a box office draw, given that people would watch almost anything with him at a point.
But I’ve been rewatching some old RAWs and now I notice how bad he was at ad-libbing against guys like Jericho and Triple H. It especially contextualizes the hissy fit on his last comeback tour in the WWE, which he threw because Cena (rightfully) made fun of him for having notes on his wrist.It makes me think that much of Johnson’s current success is more due to following other, more clever and passionate folks like Brian Gewirtz (who wrote a majority of The Rock’s WWF material) or Vin Diesel than his own inate talent. Now it feels like he’s finally in control of his brand and it might be the worst thing to happen to him.
“the man’s actually worthwhile wrestling career was built on getting his ass beat.”Sure it was.
I re-watched the 2004 Walking Tall not too long ago (it’s, like, 90 minutes! What a treat!) and The Rock gets his ass positively beat in it, which he would never allow to happen today. He really thinks his major selling point is that he’s an indestructible man with the thickest neck you’ve ever seen, instead of literally any of the things that propelled him to stardom in the first place.
He really thinks his major selling point is that he’s an indestructible man with the thickest neck you’ve ever seen, instead of literally any of the things that propelled him to stardom in the first place.His wrestling career prepared him to stardom, not the incredibly mediocre movies he starred in between 2001-2007.
In all seriousness, almost none of his earliest film roles were particularly successful. Walking Tall did a pitiful $55m at the box office, The Scorpion King only did $180m (and it was coming off of The Mummy Returns which set box office records just the year before), The Rundown did $80m (outright less than its budget, unlike the other two), and Be Cool only did $96m. In other words, aside from The Scorpion King, every one of those movies ended up losing money once you factor in marketing and advertising costs.
In fact, his most successful movie, financially, before his inclusion in the Fast series was The Game Plan, which grossed nearly $150m on a roughly $50m budget (that includes marketing and advertising). Now that’s hardly a blockbuster, but considering the type of movie it was (compared to his earlier offerings), he could’ve gone one of two ways: stay physically smaller and do comedies, or get significantly bigger and go full action-star, as almost every single one of the earlier movies had him straddling the fence.
He chose the latter, and financially for almost everyone involved, it was the right choice. It’s simply ahistorical to think that The Rock was making blockbusters when he was at his physically smallest (he specifically got off the significant steroids when he left the WWE for the first time in 2001-2002, and his comeback as “Hollywood Rock” in 2003 had him at his physically smallest during his entire WWE run).
The fact is that the biggest movies that The Rock has been in have been those once he got back on the juice, got physically bigger than he’s ever been (even during his wrestling days), and where he plays up his status as the biggest dude in the room. Say what you want about the quality of the films (or whether he should be a leading man in pure action films), but in terms of sheer gross numbers, he’s doing better now than he was at the start of his acting career, as a much physically smaller actor, which is telling since he was coming off of being arguably the third most popular professional wrestler in the world behind Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold.
Captain Marvel isn’t even supposed to be goofy, though.
Plus, the basically made Atom Smasher a jokey goofball in Black Adam. Except he was neither funny nor charming.
In Atom Smasher’s defense, his character started off as Infinity Inc’s Nuklon, a 7 foot-tall red-headed jewish teenager named Albert Rothstein who thought nobody would recognize him unless he did something to stand out, like shave his hair into a mohawk.
Like, the kid has ALWAYS been a weirdo.
“It’s certainly more interesting than hearing fellow theatergoers grumble, “Who’s that,” “What are they from again,” and “I have to watch a TV show, too?””
So, this person who is grumbling, they DON’T know who these characters are, but they DO know they’re from a TV series, but they DON’T know that they’re also from The Suicide Squad movie?
I’ve seen both Shazam movies but got bored halfway through Black Adam and turned it off. I understand that it makes sense for the characters to be on screen together given their background, but the tone of the movies is so different I think it would have been really weird to mash them together. I mean, weirder than the usual atonal mashing super hero movies somehow manage to pull off.
So the superhero-zation of Hollywood basically has led to some of the first real bad press for a popular actor. Sounds like the guy wanted his own piece of the superhero world and tried to kind of sneak his way in by making Black Adam a bigger DC character than he was. All the big lead roles were already taken. Black Adam was definitely an unexpected choice for the focus of a movie, but that could have had the potential to be something new and interesting.
It really is incredible how this attempt at a DC movie universe is filled with so many bad decisions, bad ideas and bad luck. And no matter what, they continued (continue?) to go all in and move forward even when things weren’t going so well. On some level I wish they did try to salvage the good things out of the series (keeping Cavill, etc), but stubbornly sticking it out isn’t really the logical thing to do. Starting over makes sense.
This news kind of brings into more sharp focus the little tidbits we’ve gotten here and there about The Rock not being as nice as he seems, or rather, being duplicitous – I’m thinking of the feud with Vin Diesel. I remember back when it was announced that The Rock was going to be Black Adam – he was initially given the choice of playing Shazam or Black Adam, and he chose Black Adam. Next, instead of sticking to the comics, he grits up the character which is – strange. Now, he’s outright been sabotaging because he doesn’t want to play opposite a goofball character like Shazam? Dude. Do you even know what property you joined? If WB/DC knew you were so interested in being a part of the DCEU, you probably could have asked them to bring up any other character or villain and built a property around you. Also, what kind of a jerk does so much manipulating just so he can punch Superman in the face? What has The Rock got against Superman?
Hey, if he punches Superman in the face, he WILL ALWAYS BE the man who punched Superman in the face.
Shazam should’ve just been its own insulated little movie series. That’s actually the way ‘Captain Marvel’ started anyway, before DC bought the separate comic company back in the ‘70s.
It is ok that The Rock loves pie. You can eat as much pie as you want, its math and religion.I mean if you commit the sin of too much cake, you are right in ten commandments territory with the sin of gluttony.But it is well known that sin π = 0so indulge!
hair pie
This is the best math joke I’ve ever seen. I’m going to tuck it away for ten years, and when my son is doing trigonometry I’ll bust it out on him, and I’ll say, “I got this one ages ago from a burned out game developer on this website that’s just ai porn now.”
He needs to go back for a brief run in WWE and have someone go over on him to get some humility back. For all his bravado in WWE as a character, Dwayne the wrestler always graciously let people go over.
Rumors abounded that he was going to lose to his cousin at Wrestlemania, but that appears to have died a Cody Rhodes shaped death.
Cody Rhodes is just about the only thing interesting happening in WWE right now. Rock should come in and have Cody go over him to build up to Roman, instead of the expected Roman/Rock match.
No movie studio is gonna sign The Rock to a $20m+ contract and then have him risk serious injury by having a wrestling match. That’s been the main issue as to why he hasn’t made a return in these recent years. While it was claimed that he wanted to wait until Wrestlemania was in Los Angeles to coordinate a match with Roman Reigns, the insurance implications from the studios have been the main impediment.
Losing your star for a number of weeks/months easily balloons the production costs of a movie, and no insurer is gonna wanna take that risk because of The Rock’s age, frailty, and the risks involved in working a match.
After Black Adam, maybe they wouldn’t mind having him sit on the shelf/away in the wrestling corner away from the mass movie public, and reverse his ongoing overexposure and egos issues. Nice excuse to push back the Rock vehicle you may have on the schedule that is looking not so great right now.
He needs to go back for a brief run in WWE and have someone go over on him to get some humility back. For all his bravado in WWE as a character, Dwayne the wrestler always graciously let people go over.
This reminds me of those rumors that Vin Diesel and Dwayne had contracts on one of the Fast & Furious movies that stipulated neither of them could lose a fight and the amount of blows each could land on the other. Don’t know if that was ever true but I could definitely see Johnson as refusing any cameo/appearance that paints him as a villain. He’ll do antihero but not outright villain.
Yes, Sandberg, I’m sure it was Peter Safran who called on Jen Holland up, and not her husband. There’s being “diplomatic”, and there’s treating your audience like they’re imbeciles.
Just a reminder that Johnson (and Statham and Diesel) had clauses in their contracts about every single punch thrown in the F&F franchise. All 3 were adamant that no one was allowed to hit harder.It’s no surprise that he wanted Black Adam to fight Superman and no one else. I would also not be surprised if Johnson wanted Black Adam to win.
When I saw the ending in Shazam!FotG I thought “Cool, I know these characters! I love Peacemaker” Then I looked over at my young daughter and son in the theater and thought, “There’s no way they would know these characters and there’s no way I’m letting them watch Peacemaker or even The Suicide Squad anytime soon,” so it was an awkward choice for a “family” film.
This whole thing just made me think of an alternate universe where The Rock played Superman at some point which I think is such a better fit for him.