Dwayne Johnson has been trying to make BLACK ADAM for 15 years. The movie has been in development for almost as long as Johnson has been a movie star — it was one of the first big projects that came to him as he made the leap from pro wrestling to the big screen.
With that much history, it is impossible to summarize everything that has going on behind the scenes of BLACK ADAM. Eventually, there could be a book that explains everything that went into the making of this movie, and we would love to hear all the details of BLACK ADAM‘s evolution as the larger superhero movie trend exploded at the same time.
For now, here's a quick overview to tell you how BLACK ADAM finally ended up on the big screen.
On the red carpet for the premiere of BLACK ADAM, Johnson looked back at the movie’s long gestation period.
“I fought so hard for this movie to get this movie made, and keep it on track. Fifteen long years, and here we are. Before I walked out of my trailer on day one, I was grateful: Thank you, God; thank you, universe; let’s go to work. I go on set, I go to meet our director, Jaume Collet-Serra, I start talking to him about the scene, and then I look up. When I look up about 20 feet away, all the JSA [Justice Society of America], all the actors are in their costumes, all standing there, walking towards me and Jaume. I was blown away. I will never forget that moment because in that moment everything crystalized.”
We’re not going to recount the full history of the character Black Adam, because that goes all the way back to 1945. That's when Fawcett comics introduced Black Adam as a character in a Captain Marvel storyline. (Captain Marvel is the original publication name for the character which became commonly known as Shazam after a copyright dispute with Marvel Comics in the 1970s.)
Just as the character's comic book history is long and complex, so too is the history of this movie's development.
The role of Shazam was offered to Johnson in 2006, before IRON MAN and Marvel Studios completely changed the superhero game for movie studios. A few years of development ensued with Peter Segal set to direct, and in that time Johnson grew more attached to Black Adam. But for about five years, from 2009 to 2014, that movie languished without much development activity.
Years later, Johnson nearly played Black Adam for the original SHAZAM! movie. "When the first draft of the movie came to us, it was a combination of Black Adam and Shazam: Two origin stories in one movie,” Johnson told Vanity Fair. "Now that was the goal—so it wasn’t a complete surprise. But when I read that, I just knew in my gut, ‘We can’t make this movie like this. We would be doing Black Adam an incredible disservice.’ It would’ve been fine for Shazam having two origin stories converge in one movie, but not good for Black Adam."
The final version of BLACK ADAM only truly locked into place a few years ago, when Johnson was making Disney’s JUNGLE CRUISE. Johnson and the superhero movie’s producers pitched JUNGLE CRUISE director Jaume Collet-Serra on the antihero movie — and the director’s concerns about the general audience awareness of the character was almost an issue. “I did think about that a lot because I didn’t know about Black Adam either,” he told Vanity Fair.
But the fact that Black Adam is a relative unknown actually worked in the movie’s favor. This wasn’t like making a new Superman or Batman movie, where you had to structure the story to explain how the character gets to a level of power in order to move the story forward. "This is a movie where you introduce Black Adam right away, and then throughout the movie you slowly peel back the onion and reveal what happened," Collet-Serra said.
The result is a movie unlike any other Marvel or DC superhero movie so far. It's got Johnson as a deleriously powerful and black-hearted antihero, with a journey that mirrors the movie's own long development.
BLACK ADAM opens on October 21.
All images courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.