The dust has settled on Shazam! Fury of the Gods now that the most recent chapter in the DCU has limped out of theaters and made its way onto digital and VOD, and the results aren’t pretty.
Zachary Levi’s sophomore outing as the titular superhero couldn’t even reach $140 million at the global box office, and has gone down in the history books as one of the biggest bombs in the genre’s history. That would have sounded unfathomable had you told someone the sequel would flop so hard shortly after the opening installment’s release, but DC has been reshuffled in the interim yet again.
As a result, Levi’s friendship with recently-installed co-CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran might be the only thing working in his favor to stick around as the costumed crimefighter, while Gal Gadot’s future as Wonder Woman is also entirely up in the air after Patty Jenkins walked away from the threequel.
That means the hard work that went into securing the franchise’s canonical Diana Prince for her Fury of the Gods cameo may end up meaning nothing in the long run, which is a bit of a shame when Levi outlined the hard work that went into it when speaking to Entertainment Tonight.
“”I was just stoked that she was down to it. She crushes it. It was really cool that Gal was down to play in our sandbox. She was busy working. She was shooting something else entirely, so we had a body double on our end. Then we were able to shoot her stuff on another side. I think they did a great job seamlessly cutting all that together. And I love that Billy is so in love with her. He’s so infatuated, and he’s so nervous! That was fun to tap into. It felt like going back to being my 17-year-old self.”
It might be a sandbox that neither of them get to play in again, but at least they managed to cross paths that one time before being shuffled off into the sunset alongside the likes of Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Dwayne Johnson, and no doubt a few more still to come.