Dwayne Johnson brings the thunder in first Black Adam trailer

DC and Warner Bros. have been teasing little bits of footage from director Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam since last year, showing off Dwayne Johnson’s eponymous superhero as he brutally electrocutes some poor jerk to death… because Black Adam isn’t really a superhero at all.

He was originally a straight-up villain, the bad guy inversion of Shazam (a.k.a. Captain Marvel, but nobody uses that name for him anymore for some reason) like Venom or the Reverse Flash or whichever variation of that trope you prefer, but for far much more of his history he’s been an antihero who just wants to do whatever he thinks his best for Kahndaq—the fictional Middle Eastern/African nation he calls home. Naturally, that often involves electrocuting people to death with a scary version of Shazam’s powers, which, to the uninitiated, seems like something a bad guy would do.

Well, today Warner Bros. released the first proper trailer for Black Adam, giving us a better chance to see just what kind of a guy this bad guy really is.

“I was slave until I died,” Johnson says in trailer. “Then I was reborn a god. My son sacrificed his life to save me—now, I kneel before no one.”

Black Adam, which is technically a part of the DCEU and technically a spin-off of Shazam! (they get their powers from the same wizard), stars Johnson as Black Adam, Noah Centineo as Justice Society Of America member Atom Smasher, Aldis Hodge as the JSA’s Hawkman, Sarah Shahi as Adrianna Tomaz, Quintessa Swindell as JSA member Cyclone, and Pierce Brosnan as mystical archeologist Doctor Fate. Uli Latukefu, who plays one of the young Rocks on Young Rock, will also appear in the movie.

After what feels like years and years of delays (but that’s just because Dwayne Johnson has been talking about playing Black Adam since before Shazam! came out way back in 2019), Black Adam will be in theaters on October 21.