There was a time early on in the DC Extended Universe, long before Warner Bros. opted to overhaul its comic book movie franchise as Worlds of DC, when the standalone Shazam! film was expected to herald Black Adam‘s cinematic debut.
But times have changed, and so too has Warner’s superhero franchise. No longer is Black Adam tethered to David F. Sandberg’s 2019 spinoff; instead, the Powers That Be have decided that the brooding crusader is big and ugly enough to headline his own DC movie, one which is evidently still gestating in the bowels of development.
Amid all these updates, though, there’s been one constant: Dwayne Johnson. And here, Black Adam‘s producer Hiram Garcia explains exactly why The Rock has hung on to the project for so long.
Black Adam just made kind of great sense. It was this kind of really cool antihero, kicks ass, who believes in basically exacting justice in his way with a fascinating backstory, the history he has with regards to having been a former slave and freeing his people and then getting his abilities and what happened from there. So I pitched that to Dwayne early on, and he loved the idea, and we’ve just kind of kept it in the back of our mind. We had a great conversation with Warner Brothers one time years ago, and we all settled on this was our character.
He’s about to have his patience rewarded, it seems. Not only are Warner Bros. happy with the script (it’s coming together “really well,” according to Hiram), but there’ve been rumblings that filming will commence late next year, long after the world has been introduced as Zachary Levi as Billy Batson.
Whatever the case, Dwayne Johnson is ready to bring his own unique approach to Worlds of DC, and we can already imagine the actor’s Instagram updates from the Black Adam set…
