We’re currently gearing up for Black Adam, bringing Dwayne Johnson into the DCEU. His DC movie has a been a long-time in the making, and he and the other filmmakers have been talking about how it’s going to shake-up the entire franchise.
“It’s not your typical superhero movie where a guy wants to be a superhero and gets the powers, and then you spend 50 minutes trying to figure out how the powers work,” Jaume Collet-Serra, director of Black Adam, told Vanity Fair. “This is a movie where you introduce Black Adam right away, and then throughout the movie you slowly peel back the onion and reveal what happened.”
Although the Black Adam trailer suggests we’ll get some of the standard superhero movie trappings, like everyone learning who Johnson’s anti-Superman is, it’s a relief to hear it’ll be structured differently. Something the MCU and DCEU have suffered from is formulaic storytelling, especially in origin films. If Black Adam can break free of that, it’d an a refreshing element to watching The Rock lay the smackdown on everyone.
Black Adam has had a long road to the screen. At one point, he was going to part of adventure movie Shazam, but Johnson himself chose otherwise, wanting to give the character more space in his own film.
Johnson’s been talking up what kind of violence we might see, outright stating that Black Adam will “rip somebody in half” if provoked. That’s quite the contrast to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of DC’s big screen roster.
The official synopsis for the new Dwayne Johnson movie reads: “Nearly 5,000 years after he was bestowed with the almighty powers of the ancient gods – and imprisoned just as quickly – Black Adam (Johnson) is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice on the modern world.”
Black Adam is in cinemas October 21, 2022. For more caped crusading, check out how to watch the Batman movies in order.