‘Black Adam’ Producer Offers Reassurances That the Film is Still Definitely Happening

Fanny pack enthusiast The Rock Johnson is one of the hardest working men in showbusiness, making it difficult to get some of his long gestating projects off the ground. It's tough to shoot a movie with a guy who's already busy shooting three other movies, you know what I mean?

A while back it was announced that the wrestler turned actor was going to be joining DC's film universe as legendary villain Black Adam, but the project kept being delayed while its star maintained his ridiculously packed schedule. The film is definitely still happening, though, at least according to producer Hiram Garcia.

In a recent interview with Collider, Garcia confirmed that the film is coming, just probably not as fast as people would have liked...

“So where we are now with Black Adam is we just got our latest script [from Adam Sztykiel]. We’re doing some revisions on it. We’re extremely excited about it, the studio’s very excited about it. And I’m telling you man, as a comic book fan, when this thing comes out, it is going to be amazing (laughs). This is the fanboy in me talking to you, it’s going to deliver on the goods of everything you’d want to see Black Adam do, he’s going to be doing in this film.”

Garcia goes on to talk about how the film developed as a separate project from the upcoming Shazam!, which seemed to many comic book fans like the logical place to introduce Black Adam as he is one of that hero's biggest antagonists...

“...as we were developing an actual Black Adam and Shazam movie, we were just realizing that both characters are so special that we didn’t want to compromise either of them by cramming them both into the same movie. So that’s why we made the decision to let Shazam have his own standalone movie and kind of launch him properly, and then we’ll do the same for Black Adam. And so that kind of really freed things up. It allowed us to develop the right version of both.”

Like the upcoming Venom, they'll likely be going the antihero route rather than the villain route with the character, due not only to The Rock Johnson's involvement, but the fact that no one seems to know how to make a villain the protagonist of a story without fundamentally compromising them as a character. It's a stupid slippery slope we've gone down with these movies, but it's a trend that's going to continue for years to come.