Dwayne Johnson and Gal Gadot are taking very different approaches to the potential end of their DC careers. While The Rock is living so recklessly these days that he’s making dad jokes about being armed to the teeth to officers of the law, the Wonder Woman star is happy to sit back and watch the Snyderverse fandom burn to ashes in the wake of James Gunn’s rebooted DCU. If Johnson had taken another approach to his own attempt at DC domination, who knows? Maybe things would’ve been different.
Johnson got a bit too big for his boots when it came to Black Adam, as strong-arming Henry Cavill’s Superman back into the picture ultimately only embarrassed everyone involved. Much of that was because DC was already working with Gunn on a Cavill-less new Supes movie at the time. The Black Adam franchise might just have been able to survive in the Gunnverse, then, if he’d decided to team up with Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince instead. If only DJ hadn’t been too obsessed with an impossible Marvel crossover to make it happen.
Back when Netflix’s Red Notice released back in 2021, naturally conversations came up about whether Johnson and Gadot could ever work together in the former DCEU. Variety was particularly hung up on this idea at the action-thriller’s red carpet premiere, fielding the proposal to both producing partner Hiram Garcia and the Man in Black himself.
Garcia was adamant that such a thing should happen, maintaining that it was a huge must for the characters:
“We gotta see them together somehow,” Garcia said. “To see Black Adam and Wonder Woman share the screen is going to be pretty awesome. I honestly feel like Wonder Woman is one of the few superheroes that can go toe-to-toe with Black Adam.”
Johnson, for his part, however, apparently saw an Adam/Diana union as too small-fry to care too much about as he preferred the idea of a multiverse-smashing crossover with Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool:
“I think there’s a crossover with Black Adam [and] Wonder Woman,” he said. “But what we were just talking about today… I turned to Ryan [Reynolds] and Gal [Gadot] and I said there should be a crossover between Marvel and the DC Universe. We can be the ones to possibly make it happen. So, we’ll see. We’ll see what happens.”
In light of his inability to even land Black Adam a sequel, The Rock’s one-time belief that he could get a Marvel/DC crossover off the ground now seems overconfident in the extreme. In retrospect, he probably should’ve happily taken the Wonder Woman team-up concept and run with it.
