Uh, what?
People are mad at Levi because he retweeted Lyndon Wood, a known anti-vaxx jackoff.
This is Lyndon Wood:
To be fair to Levi, he then tweeted this, implying he wasn’t railing on vaccines, but more talking about the general evil of Pfizer.
So maybe he’s okay? Regardless, I have no idea where you got “performative enough in their inclusion & diversity checklists” out of all this.
Mea culpa: it’s not a great comparison to make, and I might’ve been reading into something that wasn’t there. With that said, I do think some of the reactions are comical to such a very low-information tweet, while also having the same whiff of performance and superficiality of big and terrible companies whenever they are splashing pride flags all over their branding during June.
I mean, Zachary Levi was on Joe Rogan praising Jordan flippin’ Peterson as one of the world’s great thinkers. Which tells you pretty much all you need to know.
Taking a break Zachari Levi’s shitty thoughts - why does that trailer look so shit? The actual action in it looks fine I guess, but they’ve spent god knows how many millions on cgi and Helen Mirren - why is everything looking like flatly lit garbage with no contrast and gray sludge instead of blacks and highlights? Why is any random 80:s or 70:s b-movie more visually appealing than this?
Looks prety standard: hero becomes aware of menace, hero doubt self, hero regains confidence, hero triumphs. (and a minor character dies).
This is coming March 17th.
Not a great opening weekend.
It probably says something that nobody in this thread has yet admitted seeing the movie.
I did post a great deal about it - but I was on mobile and in the wrong thread. It’s a decent movie, I would give it a B as it was fun but had some problems with not knowing its own tone. You go from something horrific happening to a bunch of people, including (not shown, but hinted strongly) children and then the very next scene is played for laughs. Super jarring. Also I think some of Levi’s recent comments have been a little hard to take, and I think that didn’t help. But it also sounded like the director knew this was going to happen as while he stands by the movie (again, it’s not bad - I had a good time and so did my wife, which is all I ask of movies) it seems the studio left this one out to die - almost no marketing for it either. But the news of the rebooting of the DCU probably didn’t help matters either.
I think one of the criticisms I’ve seen is that Levi seems to be playing a different character entirely from the Billy Batson played by Asher Angel when he’s not powered up. In the previous movie both the superhero and the kid were jubilant about being a superhero and mainly exploring what that meant. Here, the kid is serious and worried about his family while Levi’s superhero is still acting like a 10-year-old pulling off cool skateboard stunts for the first time.
https://twitter.com/ponysmasher/status/1637856216226619392
As I’ve been saying for a while now I’m very eager to go back to horror (as well as trying some new things). After six years of Shazam I’m definitely done with superheroes for now.
Just to be clear, I don’t regret even for a second making the Shazam movies. I’ve learned so much and gotten to work with some truly amazing people. Will forever be grateful that I got to direct two of these! They’ve been very challenging but valuable experiences.
One thing I’ve really been looking forward to is disconnecting from the superhero discourse online. A lot of that stresses me out so much and it will be nice not having to think about that anymore.
Hahahaha
I think back on the movie and agree with that note.
Generally positive take:
My girlfriend and I saw it yesterday. I went in knowing it had poor critical reviews and great audience scores, and that paired with expectations set by the first movie sent me in to just enjoy the ride.
I though it was, overall, an enjoyable film, but definitely flawed. It wasn’t predictable, and the CGI fights didn’t go on forever. Biggest issue was that there was too much forced, unsuccessful humor (AKA: “Learning the wrong lesson’s from MCU’s successes”), and the disconnect between Billy and CM’s tone and behavior. There were a couple of times the performances felt a little less than convincing, but chalk that up to the writing. Helen Mirren, of course, did great.
I wouldn’t watch it again, but it was an okay way to spend a couple of Fandango gift certificates. Not overly sad we likely won’t get more.
First after-credits scene delighted me as a Peacemaker fan. Second after-credit scene really made me okay with the franchise ending – did anyone really want to see Sivana and Mr. Mind back again? Also, with the start of the after-credits shot, were they trying to make us think that was Black Adam?
Oh… if you watched the Shazam!/Isis Hour as a kid, watch for a very familiar red and yellow shirt in the crowd. Michael Gray, the 70’s Billy Batson, with the best line of the movie.
Really negative take:
World’s longest Skittles commercial.
“Taste the rainbow” was legit funny… the first time.
I didn’t laugh the first time because I said it with her; saw it coming a mile away. :)
The second time I was just kinda surprised at the (muffled but obvious) language, so I did snicker in shock.
The best part of a tentpole movie bombing is that knives come out when the movie underperforms and people start dishing on where they think it went wrong. Fingers start pointing.
In this case, some of the blame seems to be directed at Dwayne Johnson. The accusation being that he meddled in both Shazam movies while he was trying to promote his DCEU-under-The-Rock strategy to the WB honchos. The claim is that he personally denied the movies from having more substantive ties to the rest of the DCEU along with pushing the idea that Black Adam should have less to do with Shazam and more with Superman.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods did not make the splash it was intended to at the box office last week, and this week it suffered another blow as its second weekend saw a 68% drop compared to its debut.
Saw Shazam with the SO over the weekend. We enjoyed it, but agreed it was much weaker than the original movie.
Theater on primetime Friday night was maybe 25%.
Well I saw this tonight and thought it was fantastic! I thought that the whole Shazam/Freddy dynamic in the first movie was annoying (“You’re just mad that I’m popular now and you’re still a cripple!”), but I thought his character was more nuanced in this one–fear of failure, fear of abandonment, worrying that things will far apart, and so on.
I thought the action had some variety, the family dynamics were interesting, and in all it had a solid storyline that wasn’t super convoluted but still had some unexpected twists. I didn’t expect to like it, and I really really did.
Also (just in case you don’t want the end credits spoiled): I thought halfway through the movie, “It would be really funny if that caterpillar showed up at the end of this movie too, as just this running gag that goes nowhere”…and then it happened! I raised my arms like I just scored the winning touchdown! So much fun and I honestly didn’t expect it to happen.
This is up on HBO Max, errrrr Max now.
It’s not bad! It’s not great, mind you, or even on the high side of good. But I liked it more than a bunch of recent superhero movies, such as (for example) Quantumania or Black Adam.
It’s far from perfect. Much like Quantumania, the scripting can be sloppy, some actors are wasted (in the this case Dijimon Hounsou, who has a lot more screen time but oddly not much to do,) the editing can be vague thus robbing some action scenes of their punch, and cool ideas are brought up only never to be properly developed. It also has a terrible (but minor) twist at the end that robbed the main characters of their agency in the name of references and crossovers.
Yet overall this made a lot more of an impact on me than Quantumania. Mirren makes an excellent god, Darla is adorbs (in the unlikely event the Marvel family gets another movie I would be fine with it if it was entirely about her,) the family interactions were good, and some of the fantasy hijinks were great fun. If nothing else, this movie justified its existence by showing the world the Marvel family riding unicorns and impaling a cyclops.
So what’s in this movie that’s missing from Black Adam or Quantumania? In Shazam 2, it was clear that the creators cared about the main characters and wanted us to care about them too.
Contrast this with Black Adam. It had better action scenes, but I honestly gave zero craps about any of the main characters. Or Quantumania, where I used to give a crap about the characters, but quickly lost all interest because this time round filmmakers seemed to be more focused in teasing movies that won’t be out for three years or showing us unused Star Wars concept art than making us care about Scott Lang and the Pyms.
It also helped that Shazam 2 was more focused on the real world and down-to-earth than Quantumania. (Yes, a movie about Superman-level heroes fighting literal gods is more grounded than an Ant-man movie. What a world.)
This is probably the last we’ll see of these characters on the big screen for a long time. But flawed as both movies were, I’m glad they got made.
