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Dwayne Johnson Explains Why He Wanted Black Adam and Shazam To Have Separate Movies

June 11, 2022 | Posted by Joseph Lee
Black Adam Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

In an interview with ComicBook.com, Dwayne Johnson spoke about why he wanted Black Adam and Shazam to get their own movies instead of the original plan. At one point there was a script that had both Black Adam and Shazam in the same movie. Here are highlights:

Johnson the original plan for Black Adam: “The original plan, maybe five or six years ago I think, was to tell the two origin stories of Shazam! and Black Adam in the same movie. That’s what we had worked on. The script was delivered. When we all read the script, I immediately felt like, ‘We have to separate these two movies. We have to honor Shazam! and that origin story and what that is and what that can be for the fans and then we also have to tell our story, too, as well.’ I think in separating them, with the majority of the world not knowing who Black Adam if you weren’t a serious comic book fan, it was important I think to separate them and tell each story respectively.”

Producer Beau Flynn on Johnson making the call to give Black Adam his own movie: “I got a phone call very early in the morning from Dwayne Johnson which is always very intimidating. He called Hiram and I, he just said, ‘Brothers,” he said, “We’re gonna make Black Adam. We’re gonna tell this story. It’s so big and so important,’ and that was it. It was really an amazing… Dwayne’s instincts are so extraordinary but he was right. Again, we were deep in it and developing that script with both of them and there’s a reason why sometimes in our business sometimes you have to keep moving forward and sometimes the business tells you. We weren’t really cracking it. It wasn’t really working and then that’s when that call came through and everything changed.”

Producer Hiram Garcia on future plans for the character: “It’s all part of the mission. In our mind, it’s all part of a shared universe. All these guys exist together. We’re just focused on telling this story, on telling Black Adam and [Justice Society of America]. But the way we view it and our ambitions for the Universe is this is all shared. And I think you start to feel the ripples of these guys in the Universe.”

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Black Adam, Joseph Lee