There’s a time and a place to criticize a certain subset of fans who claim to be supporters of the very same franchise you play a major role in, but for Zachary Levi, the day after Shazam! Fury of the Gods cratered at the box office was probably the worst imaginable moment.
Having fell spectacularly short of even the most optimistic of projections, there’s no chance the sequel will come within a whisker of matching its predecessor’s $366 million at the box office. At this rate, it’ll be lucky to go much farther than half of that total, but Levi seems content to indulge in some conspiratorial SnyderVerse talk nonetheless.
During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the actor spoke out on his experiences playing a big screen superhero, and while he didn’t name anyone in particular, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out exactly who he was talking about.
“There’s a whole contingent of comic book fans that it’s really unfortunate that there’s this one particular group of people that think I… well, they don’t like me, because I don’t agree with them on other comic book movies. You know who I’m talking about.
But instead of there being a conversation, they take up so many of my words, or things completely out of context, and then they go stir up all their other people that they know online, and they all just want to attack, and attack, and attack, and attack. And it’s really sad, because this is just one example of so many examples of the amount of just venom, and toxicity, and bullying that goes on in these cyber dimensions.”
Obviously, he hasn’t mentioned the SnyderVerse explicitly, but you certainly don’t need to read too thoroughly between the lines to decipher his not-so-coded message. They could even end up having the last laugh, too, should Fury of the Gods fail so miserably that James Gunn and Peter Safran decided there’s no point in keeping their close personal friend around for the long haul.