My World Of Flops: Shazam! Fury Of The Gods

My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.

Until recently, Zachary Levi had the kind of career actors dream about. He made his name as the titular hero of Chuck, a spy comedy that ran for five seasons on NBC from 2007 to 2012. Levi voiced the male lead in the hit 2010 Disney cartoon Tangled, where he sang “I See The Light,” a duet with Mandy Moore that was nominated for an Academy Award and went triple platinum. He was part of the Marvel AND DC cinematic universes due to his roles as Fandral in 2013’s Thor: Dark World and 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok and as the title character in 2019’s Shazam!

Then, the handsome actor had the terrible judgment to share his beliefs with the world.

On January 29, 2023, just before the disastrous release of Shazam! Fury Of The Gods, Levi responded to the tweet “Do you agree or not, that Pfizer is a real danger to the world.” with “hardcore agree.”

A no doubt exhausted and weary James Gunn, who has the unenviable task of turning around the cinematic RMS Titanic that is the DCU, responded to the actor’s dangerous idiocy by saying, “Actors and filmmakers that I work with are going to say things that I agree with and I don’t agree with, that’s going to happen. I don’t have a list of things that somebody should say because of what I think, and I can’t be changing my plans all the time because an actor says something I don’t agree with.” 

Unfortunately for the anti-vax actor’s career, that was just the beginning, as he continued pivoting hard to appeal to the MAGA crowd. A little more than a week before the 2024 presidential election, Levi went on far-right hatemonger Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM show. He wasn’t just jizzing himself with joy at the opportunity to vote for a cast member of Ghosts Can’t Do It after his first choice, crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sold his soul to Donald Trump in exchange for a cabinet position with the power to do almost immeasurable harm. He was vibrating with excitement over supporting the rogues’ gallery of grifters, sex criminals, opportunists, and vultures that make up Trump’s inner circle.

“I’m not voting for Donald Trump. I’m voting for Donald Trump and Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard and Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, and everyone else that they’re going to bring in,” Levi gushed. 

Because he had not humiliated himself sufficiently, he went on to blather, “And this team—this ‘Avengers,’ this ‘Voltron,’ whatever you want to call it—they’re going to get in there and actually do what Donald Trump said he was going to do the first time, which is drain the swamp.”

Levi doesn’t just love one disreputable creep who showed the world how serious he was about fighting a corrupt establishment by appointing 13 billionaires to his cabinet. No one is more committed to radical change than oligarchs who have achieved unimaginable wealth and power under the current system. No, the Shazam! star loves all of the disreputable creeps jockeying madly for position while Trump’s mind crumbles further. They’re not the Avengers. They’re the Sinister Six with more sex criminals. 

It’s appropriate that Levi’s most famous film character is a beefcake with a child’s mind, because he has a dim-witted 10-year-old’s understanding of politics and a poignant, delusional belief in Trump’s fundamental decency. And Levi’s support for RFK Jr. and Donald Trump wasn’t quiet or subtle. At a Donald Trump rally in Michigan just before the election, he told the crowd, “I’m not gonna take too much time, but I did just wanna just give you a little context about why Shazam is sitting here talking to you about these various things…”

I can only imagine how excited DC must have been to have the Shazam! name and brand associated with two of the world’s most hated politicians. They similarly must have been overjoyed to have Levi refer to himself as Shazam rather than an actor who twice played the role of Shazam, once successfully, but would never do it again due to an overwhelming lack of demand.

Here’s the thing: No one should lose their career for having shitty political opinions or for expressing those regrettable convictions publicly. It’s also true that studios have a choice as to whether or not they want to enter into a business arrangement with a man who thinks that RFK Jr. is Captain America. I similarly have the right to never see another project involving Levi, because I think he’s a creep and I hate his politics. That is my right. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

It’s never positive when an actor is better known for their crackpot political beliefs than their films. Nobody wants to end up like James Woods. Levi reached that point in just a few months. Levi’s adoration of the far right probably hurt his career, but not as much as the back-to-back failures of 2024’s Harold And The Purple Crayon, which inexplicably cast him as the grown-up protagonist of the classic children’s book, and Shazam! Fury Of The Gods. 

Like Ant-Man: Quantumania, Shazam! Fury Of The Gods is a failed follow-up to a charming box-office hit whose failure inspired a surprising amount of schadenfreude.

The first Shazam! benefited from an underdog protagonist in Billy Batson (Asher Angel), a 14-year-old abandoned by his parents who has been running away from foster homes in a doomed attempt to locate his birth mother. Billy ends up in a group home alongside other children with nowhere else to go. I grew up in a group home myself. With the exception of Short Term 12, which stars Brie Larson a.k.a. Captain Marvel (which, confusingly, has also been a name for Shazam), it’s a world I almost never see onscreen.

Making Billy a group home kid yearning for family, community, and belonging gave the film a heart-tugging emotional element sorely lacking from its sequel. In Shazam! Fury Of The Gods, Billy and his group home colleagues Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), Darla Dudley (Faithe Herman), Mary Bromfield (Grace Fulton), Pedro Peña (Jovan Armand), and Eugene Choi (Ian Chen) are anything but underdogs. In this underwhelming, overstuffed sequel, these kids are the antithesis of underdogs. They’re superheroes.

Shazam is reintroduced on a therapist’s couch, complaining, “There’s already a hero in a red suit with a lightning bolt on it, and I’m fast, but he’s faster” before conceding that he feels insecure and unmanly compared to Aquaman and Batman. The joke is that he’s unburdening himself to a pediatrician rather than a shrink, but this mini-monologue accidentally highlights one of the film’s many weaknesses. Shazam is so similar to Superman that DC successfully sued for copyright infringement before the character eventually joined the DC roster. Shazam! Fury Of The Gods plays like a listless mash-up of Superman, Thor, Sky High, and Harry Potter.

Making the hero a child who turns into an adult set Shazam! apart from other superhero fare, but that’s largely lost in a sequel that mistakenly gives Levi wall-to-wall screentime while relegating the no-longer-little Billy to the sidelines. The more we see Levi’s Shazam, the less we like him. Shazam! was Big by way of Superman. In Shazam!, Billy is a mere child with the powers and, consequently, the responsibilities, of a god. In Fury Of The Gods, Billy is four years older—almost 18 years old. This only confuses matters. Instead of a child turning into an adult superhero, we have characters who are almost adults turning into superheroes who are somewhat older. 

Billy’s body and mind have aged, but Shazam keeps getting younger and stupider. He’s got a Benjamin Button thing going on. If they were to make a third and fourth Shazam film, which, thankfully, they will not, Billy would be all grown up while Shazam babbled baby talk. Shazam acquired his name by canonically possessing the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Levi’s flying crimefighter is strong, fast, and brave, but he possesses the wisdom of a golden retriever puppy who has been dropped on his head too many times. 

Early in the film, Shazam and what are canonically and embarrassingly known as the “Shazamily” use their superpowers to help survivors of a bridge collapse. Shazam assists a terrified woman whose car radio conveniently plays “Holding Out For A Hero” from the Footloose soundtrack. It’s a clumsily on-the-nose musical choice even before Levi’s superpowered goober guilelessly enthuses, “No way! Shut up! Did I just save you while you were listening to this song!?” in case anyone in the audience missed the connection. Levi’s dashing dope is a superhero who communicates like a sorority girl who has consumed too many White Claws. 

In an equally unfortunate example of the film’s sense of humor, Shazam is on a dinner date in Paris, within spitting distance of the Eiffel Tower, with someone who wants more of a commitment than he’s prepared to give. The twist is that Shazam, the adult version of an underaged teen, is on a date with Wonder Woman! 

We never actually see Wonder Woman’s face when Shazam tells her that, while the world wants to see “She-Zam” a.k.a. “The Dynamic Duo” a.k.a. “The hottie goddies” happen, he doesn’t know if he’s ready. If Gal Gadot were in this scene, it would still be cringe-inducing, but at least it would be official and not feel like the filmmakers were trying to pass off Gadot’s stand-in’s third cousin in a Spirit Halloween “Wonderful Grown-Up Girl” costume. 

The film actually does manage to get Helen Mirren, who brings a weary sense of obligation to the thankless villain role of Hespera, eldest daughter of Atlas. Mirren delivers dialogue like, “Do not underestimate the judgment of the Wizard to protect the powers of the Gods,” with a cold professionalism that suggests that she doesn’t like saying those words any more than we enjoy hearing them. The now 79-year-old Mirren holds the titles for both the oldest DCU villain and the least emotionally invested.

The daughters of Atlas are after a magical staff with the capability to steal superpowers. Shazam! Fury Of The Gods prominently features a powerful wizard, monsters, a unicorn, and a dragon in ways that would get it teased mercilessly if it were a middle school student, yet aren’t the least bit fun. Lucy Liu matches Mirren’s misplaced seriousness as Kalypso, her younger sister. Rachel Zegler is Atlas’ third daughter, though she initially appears to be a typical high school student interested in Freddy. 

Zegler’s casting is a giveaway as to her character’s true identity. She’s too big a star to be wasted as the love interest of a secondary character. Freddy, meanwhile, lucks out as the only member of the Shazamily to receive anything in the way of characterization. One member’s defining characteristic is a love for kittens, something I’d like to think is universal. In a supremely lazy exercise, Shazam! Fury Of The Gods establishes that tertiary Shazamily member Pedro is gay with a 10-second shot of him ogling a shirtless hunk followed by him later blurting out, “I’m gay.” It’s only a step up from having an extra come out as trans in the background of an action set piece. 

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods lasts an interminable 130 minutes, yet lacks the energy and ambition to do justice to its six underdeveloped heroes as it alternates between generic action and sitcom comedy. It’s either scowling grimly, despite such aspects as a sentient pen, or winking and smirking. Returning director David F. Sandberg’s surehandedness is lost, replaced by a generic competence. 

In the flop’s third act, Shazam sacrifices himself for the sake of his surrogate family (and humanity), but this is far too silly a trifle for him to remain dead long. Sure enough, Shazam! Fury Of The Gods pays off the painful Wonder Woman dating bit with a cameo by Gadot. The woman who inspired a weary nation by badly group-singing “Imagine” serves as the most literal deus ex machina in that a literal God shows up out of nowhere, fixes everything immediately, and brings a grateful Shazam back to life. 

After that initial bit of misdirection, Shazam! Fury Of The Gods is very impressed with itself for scoring a cameo from Gadot. She swaggers through her brief time onscreen with the cocky smile of someone convinced they’re saving a 130-minute-long movie with a few minutes of star power. You’d think the film scored a cameo from Marlon Brando’s ghost as Superman’s father, Jor-El, not a fading star from an already-dead DCEU.

Levi, his director, and Zegler were all surprised by the film’s performance. They can blame toxic fans, bad marketing, unkind critics, Dwayne Johnson’s refusal to appear as Black Adam (a prominent figure in Shazam mythology), or the backlash to Levi’s Trump endorsement, but if they really want to know why the film failed, they only have to watch the thing. They made a movie that was a uniquely unappealing combination of bad and boring. Instead of breathing new life into the DCEU, they merely pounded another nail in its coffin. 

Failure, Fiasco, or Secret Success: Failure