There’s no harm in creating a production company for the sole purpose of building projects entirely around the founder, owner, and CEO, but Dwayne Johnson has completely washed his hands of Shazam! Fury of the Gods in more ways than one.
Conspiracy theories were spreading like wildfire in the buildup to David F. Sandberg’s sequel that The Rock was offered a cameo and turned it down, with scuttlebutt proclaiming that he deemed the franchise to be beneath him. Of course, that didn’t stop him from taking an executive producing credit on the opener, which marks the first – and so far only – time he’s been listed behind the camera on a project that he didn’t appear in onscreen.
And yet, while Seven Bucks was all over Shazam!, the outfit’s presence was suspiciously absent from Fury of the Gods. While no official reason has been given, it’s a touch on the suspicious side when Zachary Levi’s title hero and Teth-Adam have been adversaries on the printed page for decades, but Johnson ducked out somewhere between Black Adam going south and David F. Sandberg’s sophomore adventure tanking at the box office.
We’ll never get to see the two go toe-to-toe in an epic clash for the ages, nor will we ever bear witness to Johnson’s long-held dream of staring down Henry Cavill’s Superman, which makes the last several years of the DCU fairly pointless in retrospect. That might prove to be a good thing a few years from now, but James Gunn and Peter Safran have an uphill battle to fight to convince audiences that re-investing is worth their time.
