The Real Face of Superman From Shazam! Movie Revealed
One of the biggest stories from the production of DC's Shazam! movie earlier this year was the [...]
One of the biggest stories from the production of DC's Shazam! movie earlier this year was the potential inclusion of Henry Cavill's Superman. There was a ton of talk about a Superman cameo somewhere in the movie, though Cavill's future with DC was called into question shortly after. It all worked out in the end however, because the final scene of Shazam! included Superman, but only from the neck down, which made the whole scene even funnier.
Cavill wasn't able to make it to the set to shoot the cameo, but one of the stunt performers from Shazam! admirably took his place. Now that the movie has been out for quite a while, we're finally getting to see the face of the headless Superman.
Stunt performer Ryan Handley shared a photo of himself to Instagram on Thursday, wearing the Superman suit and posing alongside a costumed Zachary Levi.
"That was cool," Handley wrote as the caption.
The Superman cameo certainly landed well in the final cut of Shazam!, but the version with Cavill would've been a little bit longer, allowing superhero super-fan Freddie to interact with the Man of Steel.
"In the script, we had a little scene with Superman — but we only had a very narrow window to shoot this scene in the school, so we tried to make it work with Henry Cavill but schedules did not align," director David F. Sandberg explained in the home release commentary. "I was like, 'what do we do now? We need an ending to our movie,' So we actually shot a little alternative ending in case we were going to use that where the kids see a hostage situation on TV and they just go out and fly off to deal with that, but it was like, 'we don't get the payoff with Shazam's going to show up at school.' So we did this thing with our Shazam stunt double in a Superman suit and we just cut out before you see his head. And it worked really well. I thought it was really funny. At first I was like, 'This is never going to work, this is going to feel cheap,' but cutting out on Freddy's reaction like that, I think is better than what we had originally planned. Originally Superman is supposed to sit down, talk to the kids, Freddy was going to be like 'I have so many questions,' and then we were going to cut out, but this sudden cut to the credits just works so much better."
What did you think of Superman's cameo in Shazam!? Let us know in the comments!