‘Shazam!’ Director Reveals Costumes for Stand-Ins

Shazam! might already follow a teenage boy becoming a superhero, but it looks like an even more drastic transformation is happening behind the scenes of the film.

David F. Sandberg, who is directing the DC Films venture, recently took to Instagram to share a photo from the film’s reshoots. In it, two stand-ins can be seen posing for Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer) and Shazam! (Zachary Levi) — while wearing what Sandberg describes as bad “cosplay”.

It’s pretty easy to see why the photo cracks Sandberg up, especially considering how delightfully simple the Shazam! “costume” is. To an extent, that film’s main suit did undergo some changes over the course of production, something that fans are expected to see firsthand when the film’s second trailer debuts.

“Making suits is hard. Like painting a room you can look at little swatches all day but you won’t really see the effect until it’s done,” Sandberg explained online earlier this year. “The color of the finished suit didn’t look quite as expected in some lights (particularly daylight) which is on me since I decided to change fabric very late in prep and there wasn’t time for as many tests. I figured we’d just have to tweak it in post. The first image released though unfortunately didn’t have any post production done to it. That was right as we were putting the trailer together. I figured since that image was out there perhaps we shouldn’t stray too far from it in the trailer. Might be confusing.”

“There were a few iterations,” Sandberg said in a previous interview. “And you sort of have to keep changing stuff even after we started shooting because you realize things… You shoot the first scene and Zach (Levi) is like, ‘You know, I can’t move my hands properly with these gauntlets.’ So, we had to redesign that, or like the boots kept falling apart so it’s like, ‘Oh well, I guess we have to do something different there,’ It was sort of a constant process of updating and making it work better.”

Either way, it sounds like all of the behind-the-scenes work will be more than worth it when Shazam! debuts, especially with Levi making a pretty epic superhero.

“There’s a lot of these moments in the movie, you know, they would take like six hours to shoot because we like had a bunch of different cameras on this lighting but you know it was just like ‘Shazam stands and looks,’ you know, this moment,” Levi explained late last month.

“There’s a couple of those moments.” Levi continued. “There was one where it was like this mist and fog and I’m standing up like this big strong heroic pose and the light from my chest was like shining through the mist and it felt really cool in the moment. And then I went back and watched it in the monitors, and was like ‘Holy crap, I’m a bone fide superhero and I want to look like this the whole time.’”

What do you think of Shazam!‘s stand-in costumes? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Upcoming DC films include Aquaman on December 21st, Shazam! on April 5, 2019, Joker on October 10, 2019, Birds of Prey on February 7, 2020, and Wonder Woman 1984 on June 5, 2020.