The future of the DCU is starting to become increasingly clear, and while a lot of people are understandably unhappy about the situation, it’s a future that doesn’t involve Henry Cavill as Superman.
If there’s one person destined to be as pissed off as the fans about the Man of Steel star’s exit as the franchise’s canonical Kal-El, though, it’s Dwayne Johnson. After all, the actor and producer spent years trying to convince the Warner Bros. regime that a post-credits cameo appearance in Black Adam from Cavill would be worth it, only for all that strong-arming to be for precisely nothing.
Cavill is officially out of the door as the Big Blue Boy Scout, then, and there’s a growing feeling that The Rock will almost inevitably be joining him after the 50 year-old maintained an almost complete silence on all things relating to DC until very recently. However, a scathing new story from The Hollywood Reporter paints a more self-serving picture of the Seven Bucks chief, describing his long-running re-recruitment of the former Witcher star as a means to further his own agenda within the DCU.
The report describes Cavill as “a pawn in Dwayne’s failed attempt to control a piece of DC,” and it’s not difficult to see how that conclusion has been reached. Johnson and his team went all-out on the Black Adam marketing blitz to tease sequels, spinoffs, and an entire corner of the overarching mythology dedicated to any and all things relating to the Man in Black, which by extension left Shazam! out in the cold after The Rock made it clear he only had eyes for a Superman showdown.
In the end, we’ve been left with no Cavill, no word on what comes next for Black Adam, no crossovers with the latter’s comic book arch-nemesis, and quite possibly 15 years of development being wasted on a single, unremarkable, and under-performing blockbuster.