Zachary Levi is still loudly unhappy over Shazam! Fury Of The Gods failure

Four months after Shazam! Fury Of The Gods flew into the theaters—and then flew right back out a month later, having just barely made back its modest $100 million budget in the process—star Zachary Levi is still unsure of what to make of the film’s performance. Levy has been a full-throated booster of the second Shazam! movie, up to and including defending it by making social media statements alluding to at least a bit of behind-the-scenes meddling with the finished product. (Levi has never come out and 100 percent explicitly said “Dwayne Johnson wouldn’t let us put members of the Justice League from Black Adam in our movie,” but he came very, very close.)

Lately, though, Levi’s ire appears to have been focused on critics, who came down quite a bit harder on the movie than audiences did. (Just as a data point, the movie’s critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes is almost 40 percent lower than its audience rating.) Speaking on The FilmUp Podcast, Levy noted both that the movie’s scores with critics were “very oddly and perplexingly low,” and that “people were insanely unkind.”

Levi goes on to suggest that it wasn’t Shazam! that changed so much in the four years that passed between the first Shazam! movie and the second, but the world itself. Which isn’t entirely implausible, given everything that’s happened between 2019 and the present day, vis-à-vis global pandemics and American political unrest and God, everything that’s happened online in that time, Jesus Christ… (Sorry, the thought got away from us for a moment.)

Or, to put it in Levi’s terms:

I think even just the world, from the first movie to the second movie, the world has shifted so much. Social media has shifted so much. Hate, online hate and haters and trolls, and factions and all that has just gotten more galvanized in its toxicity. I think there are people who genuinely, unfortunately, want to destroy certain projects because they don’t like them, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like other people involved in them or whatever.

This is, as connoisseurs will know, actually pretty mild on the “Zachary Levi holds forth on our public ills” scale. Even so, Levi says he has no idea where Fury Of The Gods’ reception leaves the Shazam! franchise. He expressed his hope that “people will go back, people will watch Fury Of The Gods on home streaming or on a plane or whatever” and re-evaluate it. But unless they re-evaluate it to the tune of another $100 million in Warner Bros. Discovery’s pockets, it seems unlikely we’ll be seeing Levi as the Big Red Cheese again any time soon.

[via IGN]