Remember when the internet used to like Dwayne Johnson? That time is getting increasingly harder to remember in the wake of The Rock’s DC takeover bid totally failing to take off late last year with the short-lived rise and fall of Black Adam. DJ’s popularity with the DC fandom is so low, in fact, that he’s now getting blamed for Shazam! Fury of the Gods‘ underwhelming opening weekend, with the finger being pointed yet again at Johnson’s wayward treatment of the Black Adam character.
As has been well-documented, Johnson did all he could to reinvent the supervillain as a superhero, a change that many felt led to Black Adam being much more toothless than it should’ve been, not to mention harming the Shazam franchise as it couldn’t use Billy Batson’s greatest enemy in any form. As one viral tweet claimed, then, maybe The Rock should’ve taken more pointers from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who initially had similar objections to the role of the Terminator.
Of course, Schwarzenegger later got his wish to play more of an anti-hero in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which provided one of the best redemption stories for a villain in cinema history — but the less said about every subsequent Terminator film the better. Maybe the Black Adam series could’ve soared in a similar way if the first one had painted the character as an unrepentant bad guy before he reformed in the sequel?
We’ll never know at this point as Johnson went in the direction he did with it and now Black Adam has no hope of a sequel and, sadly it seems, neither does Shazam of getting a threequel (although how much The Rock is to blame for that is up for debate). Dwayne Johnson might be built like a Terminator himself, but his own anti-hero icon has proven not to have the staying power of Schwarzenegger’s T-800.