David Sandberg Talks Moving From Small Budget Movies to ‘Shazam!’

No matter how high-stakes or well-loved a lower-budget film is, it takes some adjustment to move up to the kind of blockbusters that Hollywood seems to be churning out more and more frequently — as Shazam! director David F. Sandberg knows from personal experience.

During a visit to the set of Shazam! last year, reporters asked Sandberg what it was like moving from movies like Annabelle: Creation to something so big it has copies of the Daily Planet hanging on the walls.

“It’s quite a marathon — like, it’s a lot of work,” the filmmaker admitted. “It’s a very different way of working, just because you have to do all these pre-bits and plan everything months in advance. Then when you’re shooting it, it’s not always as fun as shooting a small movie, cause like you have to shoot…like today, we’re shooting this little piece, and this little piece, because this piece is like a unit, this is on blue screen, this is CGI, and it’s a lot of things to keep track of. So the shooting is not always fun but the result is so much more awesome than when you have these kinds of resources.”

By the time we met up with Sandberg, he had already filmed big pieces of a particularly demanding battle, and was close to the end of principal photography.

“We’re shooting mainly during the day, and second unit’s shooting during the night, and I want to be part of as much of it as possible, so I’m not getting a lot of sleep,” Sandberg admitted. “But yeah, we’re doing some cool stuff.”

Warning – Potential SPOILERS Follow!

DC and Warner Bros. are ramping up the marketing and promotion for Shazam!, and we’re seeing more and more interesting detail reveals every day. Now, thanks to New York Toy Fair this past weekend, we have an even better look at some of the surprise characters included in the movie: the hero’s superpowered foster family, and the evil magical beings they’ll be up against, The Seven Deadly Sins. The demons represent the Seven Deadly Sins, as you can probably tell from their names, “Pride,” “Wrath,” “Greed,” etc. In DC Comics, The Sins (aka “The Seven Deadly Enemies of Man”) are imprisoned in the Rock of Eternity where Billy Batson first meets the ancient wizard. If you look back at the first Shazam! trailers, you’ll clearly see an early foreshadow of the Seven Deadly Sins still imprisoned in the movie version of their statues, during the scene where Billy first meets The Wizard.

If you want to learn more about we recently learned during an exclusive preview of Shazam! held for press, be sure to listen to our full breakdown on the ComicBook Nation podcast. You can listen to that, below:

The DC Movie Universe continues with Aquaman, in theaters now. Shazam hits theaters on April 5th, Joker on October 4th, Birds of Prey on February 7th, 2020, Wonder Woman 1984 on June 5th, 2020, and The Batman on June 25th, 2021.