The breakout star of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, Rachel Zegler, can currently be seen in her follow-up role as Anthea, the Greek goddess and daughter of Atlas, in Shazam: Fury of the Gods. The anticipated film was recently released to a bevy of negative reactions. Deadline reports that Zegler recently took to Twitter encouraging people to give the film a chance as she laments the harsh criticisms it has faced.
On March 8th at 8:42 pm ET, Zegler posted the following tweet which reads, “Some people out there and just being… senselessly mean. And it’s unnecessary. And I know, I know, ‘If you can’t handle the heat…’ and all that nonsense, and you’re right. But our film is actually very good, it’s just cool to hate on fun nowadays. That’s okay. We’re good.” The tweet proceeded her former post, which stated, “hey our film is actually really good! but mostly i just absolutely loved making it and the people i met whilst doing so go see it! give it a chance. we have an 85% audience score for a reason.”
The DC property is currently up in the air in regard to its future. Originally, Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam was made to set up a big showdown between Shazam and Black Adam. It was even planned to have Black Adam’s origins told in the first Shazam until Johnson wanted his own film. Then, Johnson would set his sights on a Superman crossover, but the franchise got cut off when James Gunn and Peter Safran outlined their new DC plans. Zachary Levi has stated that there are no plans to recast or even discontinue Shazam, although with the film’s underperformance, it could be a sign that audiences are waning on the character or deem it irrelevant since the storylines will be getting rebooted anyway.
The movie would go on to gross somewhere over $60 million worldwide upon release. The sequel was not expected to outperform the first; however, it would do even less business than previously predicted. Zegler is correct about the audience score coming in at 88%, so if anything, it’s still capturing the pleasure of some audiences.