DCEU’s Black Adam has been in the works for a really long time and its release is only weeks away now. Dwayne Johnson signed on to play the character before the first movie of the DCEU, Man of Steel even came out, hence, Black Adam is the DCEU movie that’s spent longest in production.
The first idea was to introduce Black Adam in the Shazam! movie which came out in 2019. In DC comics, Black Adam is Shazam’s primary villain who has the exact same powers as Shazam but he uses them with different motivations. However, Dwayne Johnson asked Warner Brothers to allow for a solo Black Adam movie and since Johnson has a lot of gravitas in the industry, he convinced the studio.
The idea was probably the right one, as Black Adam’s projected earnings right now are roughly double those of Shazam! in 2019, which is saying something, since the amount of people going to cinemas as a whole was greater in 2019 before the COVID-19 Pandemic struck.
Early projections for Black Adam according to Variety are roughly in the area of $328 million, double that what Shazam! made in 2019, which was roughly $159.1 million.
In terms of the movies coming out in the second half of this year, Black Adam’s projected earnings stand at 3rd position behind Avatar: The Way of the Water and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It is important to note that both of those movie are coming with the support of wildly successful prequels while Black Adam is the first time the super hero is even showing up on the big screen in modern times.
The massive projected numbers are no doubt indicative of the successful marketing of the film and of the pull of Dwayne Johnson’s star power. Dwayne has been marketing Black Adam as his dream project and a project that will be a total game changer for the DCEU for a while now and it seems that his strategy has worked.
Black Adam comes out on the 21st of October.
