Dwayne Johnson is well known as one of the hardest working stars in the industry, which goes some way to explaining why we’re still waiting on the Black Adam movie, despite the actor signing on to play the title character all the way back in 2007. Following the success of Shazam! though, production on Black Adam is finally starting to gear up, with Jaume Collett-Serra set to direct and shooting tentatively penciled in for next year.
In a recent interview, Hiram Garcia, one of the key figures in Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions, gave the biggest updates on the movie to date and it certainly sounds as though Black Adam is something of a passion project for the producer:
“We have a script. We have a great script. We have a great director now. We are going into polishes and tweaks, but we are thrilled with the story and with the world we’re creating, the studio’s thrilled, our partners are thrilled. And, look, at my core I always like to say, ‘I was a fanboy before anything’. And I was fortunate enough to become a producer and come into this business… We’ve worked very closely with our writers on this and I think the fans are really going to dig what we’ve got planned. We have an idea of the direction we want to go, but we’re actually in the process now of assembling our crew and our team of filmmakers. So all that is in the works.”
Dwayne Johnson hasn’t exactly made a career out of playing the villain, and despite rumors that he could be portraying the bad guy in a potential third Shazam! movie, it sounds as though Black Adam will lean heavily into the antihero aspect of the character:
“He was created as a villain. And through the love of the fans and through some great writers and storytellers, he evolved into an antihero. The antihero is a character that we always loved and that we responded to. But we understand that there’s been many aspects to Black Adam. But ultimately this is a guy, he does have a moral compass, as skewed as it may be… He’s not just ‘justice for all’. And he’s not just a villain. This is a guy who’s complex, who’s had many things happen to him and that all shows in his actions. So this is a guy who’s going through a journey. He will find himself, but where it goes, you guys will have to find out. But believe me, we know as a huge fan myself, this is a guy who is complicated and vicious.”
It’s encouraging to hear Black Adam being spoken about so definitively after Warner Bros. have spent well over a decade trying to get the project off the ground, and the critical praise that greeted Shazam! along with the prospect of seeing Dwayne Johnson play a superhero for the first time ever will no doubt ensure that there’s going to be a ton of interest in the movie.
