Zachary Levi thinks Shazam! did “f**king great” at the box office

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

When AQUAMAN came out in December 2018 it wowed everyone by kicking off a massive wave at the box office that led to over $300 million domestically and over $1.1 billion worldwide. A few months later, DC’s newest movie, SHAZAM!, came out to a solid opening weekend, but didn’t quite hit the same high’s with $140 million domestic and $364 million worldwide. But still, star Zachary Levi doesn’t think that number is anything to scoff at – and on the contrary – thinks it's pretty damn impressive when you take into account the genre.

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Levi was speaking at FAN EXPO in Canada recently (via ComicBook) when he got on the subject of the movie’s box office performance. Some people on the internet have been targeting the movie, claiming it stands as a box office bomb, but Levi thinks that when you consider the competition and the built-in universes of other superhero movies, the business SHAZAM! did was incredible.

“I’ve seen some of this stuff bandied about on the interwebs, and people saying that if you look at the numbers that we did as a movie, that it pales in comparison to some other movies that did insane amounts. But the truth is, for an origin story of a niche DC character, I think we did f—ing great.”

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Marvel Studios has released three films this year – CAPTAIN MARVEL, AVENGERS: ENDGAME, and SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME – and each has crossed the $1 billion mark, with ENDGAME becoming the highest-grossing movie ever. A large reason for their successes is the shared universe at their core, which has been bringing in audiences for over 11 years. DC has tried to mimic that universe building for years and SHAZAM! marks a solo outing that manages to stand apart from others in the series and star a character no one really knows.

“I would say, a lot of times these movies, the first run of whatever these characters being introduced to the world, people have hesitations,” he continued. “And there are a lot of people that had hesitations when it came to, ‘That geeky Chuck guy, he got to be Shazam?’ That’s right, motherf—ers!”

While you could say characters who has successful first outings, like Doctor Strange and Captain Marvel, had to overcome some obscurity, they did indeed have the MCU backing them up. Go back even further to 2011, and you’ll see that THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGERS, made numbers similar to SHAZAM! ($449 million and $370 million, respectively). Then, after the AVENGERS bump, the numbers for the sequels had big jumps, and it was all up from there.

More to Levi's point, SHAZAM! didn't quite have the superhero spectacle that makes for the big event movie of others in the genre, nor did it have a comparatively massive budget (about $100 million). It worked more like a comedy that happened to have superheroes in it, and for a movie that feels mostly like a comedy, the amount of money it made is rather great. No matter how you view the results, they were good enough for Warner Bros., who have given the go-ahead for a sequel.