At one point there was talk of making the movie SHAZAM! for New Line Cinema, I remember Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was rumored to play the arch-nemesis, Black Adam, and then name Peter Segal was attached to direct the project and although the idea of making a movie based on Captain Marvel might be considered ludicrous to some, I thought this could be one of those movies that are so bad, they’d turn out to be half decent.
But unfortunately screenwriter John August wrote on his blog about his frustrations because not only the project is now dead, he also regrets not using the times spent on working this project, to do other gigs instead, other gigs that may have seen the light of day by now.
“By “dead,” I mean that it won’t be happening. I don’t think it’s on the studio’s radar at all. It may come back in another incarnation, with another writer, but I can say with considerable certainty that it won’t be the version I developed.
In retrospect, I can point to two summer Warner Bros. movies that I believe defined the real issue at hand: Speed Racer and The Dark Knight. The first flopped; the second triumphed. Given only those two examples, one can understand why a studio might wish for their movies to be more like the latter. But to do so ignores the success of Iron Man, which spent most of its running time as a comedic origin story, and the even more pertinent example of WB’s own Harry Potter series. I tried to make this case, to no avail.”
Here’s what August said about the character… Captain Marvel is a superhero roughly as powerful as Superman, minus the heat-vision and cold breath. What’s unique about the character is that in ordinary life, he’s teenager Billy Batson. Speaking the name of the wizard who gave him his powers (Shazam) calls down a magic thunderbolt, transforming him into the studly superhero. But he’s still a teenager in there.
His intention has always been about making SHAZAM! into a action comedy movie, not dark gloomy crime drama ala The Dark Knight, but it sounds like August has become another victim of studios wanting to copy the success of Nolan’s great Batman sequel.
I love The Dark Knight, but we can’t expect every movie out there to have the same mood.
This brings me back to WB’s plan to make the next Superman movie to be a bit ‘darker’. I’m not sure if I wanna see that version.
