Black Adam Producer Reveals Why Warner Bros. Delayed the Movie

Of all of the projects on DC’s upcoming arsenal of movies and shows, Black Adam has had a pretty unique spot. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has been attached to portray the character for over a decade, with the project finally getting off the ground to be released this year. Back in March, it was revealed that Black Adam would not be keeping its previously-held release date of July 29th, and would instead be pushed back to October 21st. In a recent interview with The Wrap, Black Adam producer Hiram Garcia explained what led to that move — and chalked it up to the delays that are hitting VFX houses right now.

“I think we’re just in a world right now where there was a huge and understandable freeze-up when the pandemic hit and a lot of productions were put on hold,” Garcia explained. “Now that the industry has really roared back, the pipeline for VFX is so jammed. Obviously all these superhero movies just require so much VFX, and we’re just in a situation where the majority of the VFX houses are just completely swamped with work.”

 “They’re busting their ass and we’re so grateful for all those VFX houses,” Garcia added. “It feels like things are starting to calibrate and I think you’ll start to feel less shifts down the line.”

Garcia isn’t the only DC creative to express this sentiment, with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom helmer James Wan revealing that his film’s delay from December of this year into March of 2023 was due to a similar sort of time crunch.

Black Adam is directed by Jungle Cruise‘s Jaume Collett-Serra, and will also feature Aldis Hodge as Hawkman, Noah Centineo as Atom Smasher, Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone, Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fatte, and Sarah Shahi as Adrianna Tomaz. Uli Latukefu, Marwan Kenzari, Mohammed Amer, James Cusati-Moyer, and Bodhi Sabongui have also been cast in currently unknown roles.

“We have always had a vision of where we saw we wanted this to go,” Garcia explained in an interview late last year. “We’ve never viewed this as just a one-off movie, I’m such a gigantic comic book nerd and fan, and I love this universe so much, if you can tell from my excitement about talking about all these things. I’ve always gotten into this with a vision of, ‘This is the story we want to tell, this is where we would love to see this go, this is how we would see multiple pictures play out, possibly including spinoffs for individual characters,’ but there’s always been a rough, kind of loose outline in our head on an imaginary white board of how we’d want to do it. As we’re making that, we start to look at that a little bit more. But, again, ultimately, we need the movie to be received well and we want fans to like it, but there’s 100% a vision of what we’d like to be doing in a multiple picture aspect when it comes to Black Adam and the JSA.”

As mentioned above, Black Adam is now set to be released exclusively in theaters on October 21st.