Everyone involved in Black Adam is going to great pains to outline that the titular superhero isn’t a cookie-cutter good guy by any stretch of the imagination, even though the role is being inhabited by Dwayne Johnson, the A-list megastar who always tends to play slight variations on largely the same wholesome, heroic persona.
Having been described by director Jaume Collet-Serra as the Dirty Harry of the genre, the leading man and producer laughed off suggestions that Teth-Adam would have a no-kill rule, which was immediately reinforced when one of the first things he did in the DC FanDome sizzle reel was electrocute somebody into nothingness.
All signs point to a comic book adaptation that’ll be about as dark and violent as you can get away with in the PG-13 realm, something that was confirmed with relish by producer Hiram Garcia in a recent chat with CBR.
“Black Adam is edgy, right? That’s gonna be a PG-13 movie where it was very much like, say, The Dark Knight, where that pushed the edges of PG-13. I think we do that very much with Black Adam. We have a very high kill count in our movie.”
The fantastical nature of the artform means that you can technically get away with greater levels of violence, as long as there’s not too much in the way of visual blood, guts and gore. As Johnson has repeatedly told us, Black Adam does not practice restraint and would even murder Superman if the occasion called for it, so we can expect asses to get kicked all over the cosmos when the movie finally makes it to theaters in July of next year.