Shazam Director Says He Tried to Make Sure the Movie Wasn't Scarier Than Jurassic Park

David F. Sandberg did Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation before taking the gig directing New Line's Shazam!, the most all-ages-friendly superhero movie DC has done in years. So it's a little ironic, yes, that they turned to a horror director to do it. It led to some interesting mental math -- especially when, during reshoots, they changed a scene to be scarier, giving fans a sense of how dangerous the Seven Deadly Sins could be. That scene, in the boardroom in the skyscraper owned by Sivana's father, saw the Sins kill a whole lot of people -- and generated some chatter among audiences who worried that kids would not be able to handle it.

That certainly occurred to Sandberg, although in the spirit of movies like The Goonies (remember the blender scene) and E.T., he wanted to make the film feel a little like the Amblin movies of the '80s ("without being set in the '80s or a kind of pastiche of the '80s, which is kind of done"). But it was a Spielberg movie from the '90s that set the standard for exactly how scary he was willing to go.

"It was kind of weird because we had all these scenes that worked but it was like, 'we can do a little better,'" Sandberg said. "So originally Sivana came home to the mansion that we had in the other deleted scene and crashed a company Christmas party and just killed everyone there. It was all offscreen, it was with lightning, so the Sins never came out. But one problem we had is that people didn't really connect the actors from the beginning to the actors in the present, which is why we cast John Glover in our additional photography as both the young dad and the old dad, to have that connection for less confusion. Part of the reason we shot this scene is that we wanted to make the Sins scarier, more of a threat — so that when they threaten Darla or the kids later, near the end, you're like 'well, shit, these things are actually dangerous.' And it was fun, because I was basically told to make the sins scary and tap into my horror background. I was like, 'okay.' I still had to hold back a bit, because it's still PG-13 and should be suitable for families as well, so there's no blood. I tried to not make it scarier than Jurassic Park."

That was certainly a film where we saw monstrous, CGI things chomping people in half and staring down children. So it's actually a surprisingly close parallel.

Shazam! is now available on streaming video on demand services, and will be out on DVD and Blu-ray on July 16. Joker arrives on October 4th, Birds of Prey on February 7th, 2020, Wonder Woman 1984 on June 5th, 2020, and The Batman on June 25th, 2021.