The Rock's Black Adam To Be Slightly More Traditional Than Joker

According to a cinematographer who will be working on Black Adam, the upcoming supervillain origin film is a bit more conventional than last year's Academy Award-nominated Joker. That's likely a good thing, since it would be difficult to imagine Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson starring in an R-rated and bloddy Shazam! spinoff...but the world we're living in now apparently dictates that it's something that has to be said. The conversation came in an interview with Observer, who asked cinematographer Lawrence Sher to compare his upcoming Black Adam to Joker, a film he also shot. He assured fans that Black Adam will be a bit more conventional.

Black Adam, which sees Johnson playing an anti-hero with ties to the myhthology of Shazam!, is expected to go in front of cameras this summer. Sher will work with Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra, who will apparently helm the movie.

"The good news is we don't shoot until July. So I'm just getting into the research and development phase of discovering how it will look," Sher said in the interview. "It's super important to me because every time I set off to make a movie or a new project, I always feel as if I want it to be better than the last thing I worked on. I'm really excited about Black Adam because it's different than Joker in that it's slightly more traditional insomuch as it's really drawing from the comics."

Todd Phillips's Joker stepped away from the comics to create an entirely new take on the character's origin. While it owed certain elements and iconography to Joker stories that have appeared in the comics over the years, it was on the whole more an homage to '70s crime films like those from director Martin Scorsese.

Black Adam is expected to fill fans in on the backstory of Teth-Adam, who was entrusted with the power of Shazam long before Billy Batson, but who was corrupted by the power, turning on the Council of Wizards and dispensing a brutal idea of justice. In Shazam!, the wizard made a passing reference to a corrupted warrior generally understood to have been Black Adam, although he did not name the character.

Black Adam is expected to be in theaters in December of 2021, with a Shazam! sequel hitting the big screen about four months later, in April 2022. Black Adam will be written by Rampage scribe Adam Sztykiel.