You’d be here all day if you were asked to name a list of comic book blockbusters, or just movies in general, that found themselves heavily indebted to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which has turned out to be one of the most influential Hollywood movies of the 21st Century.
On the surface, there aren’t many direct comparisons that can be made between the middle chapter of the filmmaker’s acclaimed trilogy and next summer’s Black Adam, other than the obvious fact that both are DC Comics adaptations. However, in a new interview with CBR, producer Hiram Garcia name-dropped the modern classic when talking about how Dwayne Johnson’s superhero debut will stretch the limits of its PG-13 rating to breaking point.
“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.”
That’s encouraging to hear, especially when Johnson continues to talk up Black Adam as a violent, vengeful anti-hero who doesn’t abide by a no-kill policy and would even snap Superman in half if he were to get in his way, and you can’t keep claiming that the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe is about to change unless you can back it up.
Many big budget superhero stories tend to be cut from the same cloth, making it harder and harder for fresh properties to stand out from the pack, but the world’s biggest movie star kicking ass and taking names in the hardest possible version of a PG-13 project puts Black Adam in with a strong chance of making a serious impression.