If you’re making a movie set in a shared superhero universe and you want to make a comparison between your project and an all-star team-up, then surely you’d utilize the one that exists under the same banner. Not in the case of Shazam! Fury of the Gods director David F. Sandberg, though, and it’s sure to rile up more than a few DCU defenders.
In an interview with Total Film, the filmmaker addressed the influx of characters set to both return and make their debuts in the upcoming sequel. Given that he’s helming a DC Studios production that’s technically still tethered to the franchise’s first decade, you’d have thought the Justice League would be the first name out of his mouth, right? Wrong.
“It’s like a mini-Avengers movie. That’s how I saw it because there are so many characters. You have all these heroes, you have the villains, you have the monsters… It’s a lot of movie packed into its runtime. And it’s complicated. Just shooting and staging up to 11 characters in a scene… Where do you put everyone? It’s really hard!”
Ignoring Joss Whedon’s theatrical abomination is one thing, but even the merest hint of a slight towards the SnyderVerse doesn’t tend to go down well on social media among a vocal minority, so we can only imagine what they’re thinking after hearing the architect of a comic book blockbuster that’s set in the same continuity as Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Wonder Woman (at least for the time being) name-dropping the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s top-tier squad instead of the DCU’s.
Then again, maybe pretending the Justice League don’t exist is the wisest course of action, seeing as James Gunn and Peter Safran are preparing for a complete overhaul of the entire interconnected mythology from the ground up.