At one point it seemed inevitable that The Rock’s Black Adam would appear in Shazam!, but the director explains that was never the case.
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Dwayne The Rock Johnson has been linked to the Black Adam role for some time, even before Shazam! was put into production. That’s why fans thought he would be the main villain in a Shazam! solo film. That did not turn out to be the case, as director David F. Sandberg decided to focus on Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong) instead, while Black Adam was pushed into a solo project.
ComicBook.com had the chance to be on the Shazam! set, where Sandberg explained that Black Adam was never a part of the movie.
“Yeah, when I came on board it was like, we’re already doing that standalone Shazam movie, you know,” Sandberg said. “And I know the project existed in various forms before but I haven’t really, you know, I’m not really familiar with them all around.”
Some are predicting that if Shazam! does well then we could see Rock’s Black Ada m in the sequel, while others are predicting he could be the main villain in a Justice League 2. First is a solo project, which as Seven Bucks Productions President of Production Hiram Garcia explains, was decided on so that both characters could get their just due.
“So as we were developing an actual Black Adam and Shazam movie, we were just realizing that both characters are so special that we didn’t want to compromise either of them by cramming them both into the same movie,” Garcia told Collider. “So that’s why we made the decision to let Shazam have his own standalone movie and kind of launch him properly, and then we’ll do the same for Black Adam. And so that kind of really freed things up. It allowed us to develop the right version of both.”
In fact, Garcia was the one who pitched the character to Johnson originally.
“Black Adam just made kind of great sense. It was this kind of really cool antihero, kicks ass, who believes in basically exacting justice in his way with a fascinating backstory, the history he has with regards to having been a former slave and freeing his people and then getting his abilities and what happened from there. So I pitched that to Dwayne early on, and he loved the idea, and we’ve just kind of kept it in the back of our mind. We had a great conversation with Warner Brothers one time years ago, and we all settled on this was our character,” Garcia said.
Who knows what the future holds for the character, but we do know we’ll see Shazam! sooner than later, as it hits theaters on April 5th.
