While cruising the red carpet in his sharp salmon-colored suit at last night’s Academy Awards celebration, Dwayne Johnson got real about Henry Cavill’s exit from the DCU. While smiling for the cameras, Variety‘s senior culture and events editor Marc Malkin asked Johnson about his feelings toward Cavill’s big comeback getting ditched by the studio’s new management.
“All that I can do, and all that we could do when we were making ‘Black Adam,’ was to put our best foot forward and surround ourselves with the best people and deliver the best movie we could,” Johnson said. “Our audience score was in the 90s. Critics took a couple shots, but that’s just the business of it.”
“It’s almost like when you have a pro football team and your quarterback wins championships and your head coach wins championships and then a new owner comes in and says, ‘Not my coach, not my quarterback. I’m going to go with somebody new.'”
One of the highlights of Black Adam involves Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson) being confronted by Superman (Henry Cavill), with the Man of Steel warning the anti-hero about stepping out of line. The moment suggests a clash between the two titans is forthcoming. However, with James Gunn and Peter Safran now in charge of the studio, the battle between the two omega-level punching bags has been postponed indefinitely.
It’s hard to imagine a world where Johnson isn’t bitter about Gunn and Safran taking DC Studios in a new direction. Johnson tried for 15 years to get Black Adam into theaters, promising fans a changing of the hierarchy at DC with the anti-hero’s arrival. Unfortunately, Black Adam underperformed at the box office, bringing the character’s future at the studio into question.
“After 15 years of relentless hard work to finally make ‘Black Adam,’ I’m very proud of the film we delivered for fans worldwide. I will always look back on the fan reaction to ‘Black Adam’ with tremendous gratitude, humility and love,” Johnson told fans last December.
Johnson insists he and James Gunn are in touch and that Black Adam has a future at the studio. “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.”
Do you think Black Adam will appear in the DCU at any point? Will Cavill’s Superman return to the DCU as part of a multiversal storyline? Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below.