The Black Adam movie starring Dwayne Johnson has been in official development ever since 2014, with the movie planned as far back, and openly talked about at Warner Bros. since 2007. For one reason or another, the film kept getting delayed, until things finally seemed to be moving in a positive direction this year, with The Rock promising a next-year release to fans. That promise has come to naught, however, since Warner has now taken Black Adam off its release schedule calendar, delaying the DC Comics superhero adventure indefinitely.
Black Adam is not the only DCEU movie to have its release date altered. But while The Batman, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and the solo Flash movie have merely been postponed, Black Adam has been removed entirely from the release lineup. This development is particularly surprising since Johnson has been very active on social media in the past couple of months hyping the project up for fans and promising a path-breaking entry into the DCEU.
Black Adam started out in the comics as an antagonist for Captain Marvel aka Shazam!. Adam was portrayed as an Egyptian prince who was the first champion of the power of the Wizard Shazam, until his vast powers corrupted Adam’s nature and turned him into a villain bent on world domination. Adam would reawaken years later in the modern world to challenge Billy Batson as his successor, and continue with his plans to establish a new world order under his rule.
From hints that Dwayne Johnson had dropped on social media, his Black Adam movie would have spanned the character’s very long life, and chart his journey from a leader to a slave, to becoming a supervillain, before achieving some sort of redemption as an anti-hero.
For the longest time, Johnson was the only creative who was officially attached to the project. Earlier this year, Jungle Cruise director Jaume Collet-Serra was brought onboard the project, while Noah Centino was confirmed to be playing the role of Atom Smasher.
Most recently, Aldis Hodge was cast as Hawkman, the leader of the JSA, with the promise that several other prominent JSA members like Doctor Fate would also be a part of the project. Yet, after making seemingly so much progress towards making the movie, Warner Bros. has evidently pulled the plug on the project for the foreseeable future.
The fact is, the studio has been dragging its feet on the Black Adam film for years, despite having the world’s biggest action star attached to play the lead, and Johnson declaring repeatedly that the movie was a passion project for him. Not to mention the fact that Black Adam’s comics counterpart Shazam managed to get his own movie which turned out to be a critical and commercial success.
Hopefully, Black Adam will soon be put back on the release calendar, and Dwayne Johnson, Aldis Hodge, and Noah Centineo, and the rest of the cast will finally be able to get together with Jaume Collet-Serra to make the film they had been planning and working to complete for so long. This news arrives from Variety.