Dwayne Johnson's Black Adam movie gobbles up The Shallows director Jaume Collet-Serra

Just as our old pal Shazam! must pull his mystical, Zachary Levi-transforming powers from an ancient wizard living in a rock, so to does his eventual nemesis, Black Adam, draw his ability to exist from a semi-divine source: Dwayne Johnson’s enduring desire to get a fucking Black Adam movie on the books. Johnson has been pushing for the chance to star in a movie about this particular DC Comics C-Lister for like five years now, presumably on the grounds that the Egyptian mystical former-champion is as close as he’s ever going to get to supervillain-style reboot of The Scorpion King. (In fact, Adam was originally supposed to appear in Shazam!, before everyone remembered how hard it would be to make audiences give a shit about anything happening on the screen that wasn’t centered on The Rock.)

Now the Black Adam solo movie has taken another big, beefy step forward, with THR reporting that The Shallows director Jaume Collet-Serra—whose previous cinematic experience with large, unstoppable natural forces begins and ends with them trying to take a bite out of Blake Lively—has signed on as the film’s director. Collet-Serra just came off directing Johnson’s theme park ride adaptation Jungle Cruise for Disney, suggesting that the two men have developed a rapport, or at least that the director has learned all the proper techniques to keep Johnson’s various muscle glistens from blinding his poor camera operators all the time.