It’s a shame that Dwayne Johnson isn’t getting another Black Adam movie any time soon, because he’s got a hell of a pitch for a villain: The “vortex of new leadership”—which is what he’s blaming these days for, well, him not getting another Black Adam movie any time soon.
Johnson was bemoaning his Teth-Adam-based woes to his old pal Kevin Hart on Hart’s Peacock show Hart To Heart, when he brought up this ominous maelstrom of corporate command. Black Adam was, after all, released into a very weird moment for Warner Bros.’ DC movie apparatus: Two days after the resignation of Walter Hamada, the person-shaped placeholder who took over DC Films after Justice League under-performed at the box office back in 2018, and a month before James Gunn and Peter Safran were installed as the studios’ new overlords. Johnson’s not wrong when he says the film landed right between the couch cushions of the two regimes.
Of course, you could also argue that Johnson seems to have tried his damnedest to take advantage of that same lacuna to firmly put his own stamp on the DCEU, semi-hijacking it into a hypothetical Black Adam And Friends. He reportedly pushed extremely hard for the return of Henry Cavill’s Superman for the movie’s after-credits scene, for instance, at least in part to set up some kind of climactic grudge match between the two characters that could carry forward into future films, centralizing his own role. (He also allegedly put pressure on Warner Bros. to keep characters from Black Adam from appearing in Shazam! Fury Of The Gods, at least in part, presumably, because he’s always seemed bound and determined to distract people from the fact that his beloved anti-hero badass is intimately tied to the company’s goofiest and most kid-friendly franchise.) If Black Adam had done numbers, the future slate of the DCEU might be looking very different right now.
But Black Adam didn’t do numbers: It made about $400 million at the box office, i.e., just enough to not get outright called a flop, considering its $150 million-plus budget—but not enough to get anyone reaching for another one. (In his conversation with Hart, Johnson mostly glides over the financials, focusing mostly on the movie’s decent opening performance—although he does admit that, “Sure, no China. That could have been maybe $100 million, maybe $200 million more dollars.”) But he nevertheless contends that his franchise plans were the consequence of the leadership switchover, not box office concerns. And, hey, who wants a sports metaphor?
“You know what it is?” Johnson asked Hart. “It’s like new ownership coming in and buying an NFL team going, ‘Alright. Not my head coach. Not my quarterback. Doesn’t matter how many times we won the Super Bowl. Doesn’t matter how many rings we got. I’m going with somebody else.’” Which would seem to ignore, very stridently, the fact that there’s no reality in which Black Adam could be said to have “won the Super Bowl” even once, because it didn’t make any damn money. But whatever, what are we going to do, argue with The Rock? He’s so big!
Johnson released a statement back in December saying that Gunn and Safran would not be using Black Adam as one of the building blocks of their new DCEU.
