Black Adam was a passion project for Dwayne Johnson. The actor had been attached to play the character for well over a decade, but when the Black Adam movie finally arrived, it was in the midst of a major shake-up at Warner Bros. There had been plans for a Black Adam sequel, not to mention various spin-offs
While speaking with Kevin Hart on Peacock’s Hart to Heart, Dwayne Johnson explained why the Black Adam franchise was over before it really had a chance.
“I think that Black Adam got caught in a vortex of new leadership,” Johnson said. “And at that time, as we were creating Black Adam, developing it, shooting Black Adam, we got knocked down a little bit because of Covid and the shutdowns, got back up. There were so many changes in leadership. And as you know, any time you have a company, but especially that size and magnitude, that’s a publicly traded company, and you have all those changes in leadership, you have people coming in who creatively, fiscally are going to make decisions that you may not agree with philosophically. So I think Black Adam was one of those movies that got caught in that web of new leadership.“
Black Adam may not have been a box-office juggernaut, but it was the biggest opening of Dwayne Johnson’s career and held the number-one spot for three weeks. The movie also brought back Henry Cavill as Superman and set the stage for his return to the DC Universe. However, James Gunn and Peter Safran had other plans for the DC Universe which differed from what Johnson had in mind. “But hey, at the end of the day, you know what it is?” Johnson said. “It’s like new ownership coming in, buying an NFL team and going, ‘all right, not my head coach, not my quarterback. Doesn’t matter how many times you won a Super Bowl, doesn’t matter how many rings we got, I’m going with somebody else.’“
Dwayne Johnson spoke about meeting with James Gunn late last year and even hinted that he could still have a part to play in the new DC Universe. “My passionate friends, I wanted to give you a long-awaited Black Adam update regarding the character’s future in the new DC Universe,” Johnson wrote in the statement. “James Gunn and I connected, and Black Adam will not be in their first chapter of storytelling. However, DC and Seven Bucks have agreed to continue exploring the most valuable ways Black Adam can be utilized in future DC multiverse chapters.”