In yet another bit of mess to add to the Black Adam damage control—which so far has included the actual box office tally, Henry Cavill’s bait-and-switch Superman exit, and Black Adam being kind of a mess—Dwayne Johnson has just tweeted his response about the superhero’s future at Warner Bros.
Johnson wrote that he and James Gunn “connected” and the result is that Black Adam will not be in DC’s “first chapter” of storytelling. (The DCEU has already been around for a decade, but sure: first chapter in its latest era.) Johnson added that “DC and Seven Bucks have agreed to continue exploring” how “Black Adam can be utilized in future DC multiverse chapters.”
Genuinely, this means nothing. It means that the Black Adam IP isn’t being completely discarded, but no IP ever is. It’s in a back pocket, a vault, hidden away in some desk somewhere, and this message is absolutely the least amount of information anyone could provide when talking about the future of a character in a major franchise. Black Adam exists! Maybe! We’ll see him again! Keeping the options open!
I know the Rock doesn’t care about what I have to say, but I just wish he would stop saying so many things. It’s exhausting keeping up with all of this. Nobody cares as much about Black Adam as Johnson does, and while I understand the sunk cost fallacy that must be at play here with 15 years of work resulting in maybe $50 million of box office profit, we must be approaching the limit to this man’s dedication to a second-rate superhero film.
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