Oh boy, where to start on all of this mess.

Way back when Black Adam finally started its approach to the big screen after a fifteen year gestation period, I told my friends who I chat movies with, “Just wait. If this doesn’t go well, dude will lash out on Twitter. It’s what he did with Baywatch. It’s what he’ll do here."

Then the movie came and went. 

How’d it do?

Well, it got a whopping 39% on Rotten Tomatoes.1 And it made $384.8 Million worldwide. Not quite the numbers I’d assume DC wanted, even given COVID. I can’t imagine dropping it on VOD after a month helped either.

Undaunted, Dwayne continued to Tweet about his big plans for the DC Universe on film, saying on October 24th that he was looking forward to “building the DCEU from here".

And then this week, it got weird.

Variety posted an article about the state of Black Adam’s box office on Monday. Per them…

Box office experts believe “Black Adam" will stall out with less than $400 million globally, which is problematic since movie theater owners get to keep around half of those sales. Now, the movie stands to lose $50 million to $100 million in its theatrical run, according to the estimates of insiders as well as rival executives with knowledge of similar productions.

Not a rosy situation for the flick, especially with the new creative heads of DC Studios — James Gunn (who guided the Guardian of the Galaxy franchise, the Peacemaker series, and the Suicide Squad sequel to success) and Peter Safran (producer of many films, including Shazam, which Dwayne Johnson was said to refuse to be a part of as Black Adam) — inserted at the end of October.

So today, industry site Deadline got some weird looks for posting this decidedly more optimistic take:

There’s some snarking going on out there that Black Adam is poised to lose $50M-$100M, and that is simply just not true. Deadline film finance sources, meaning people who do this for a living and those close to the film, say this movie is bound to break even and be in the black.

Dwayne Johnson even took to Twitter himself about it, saying…

Waited to confirm with financiers before I shared this excellent Black Adam news - our film will PROFIT between $52M-$72M.

Fact.

At almost $400M worldwide we are building our new franchise step by step (first Captain America did $370M) for the DC future.

Did someone tip him off to the bombshell report coming from The Hollywood Reporter tonight?

Laying out specifics of what Gunn and Safran intend to do with the current DC comics film universe, we get the following damning quotes for the prior status quo, which itself has had multiple attempts to fix what it was since Zack Snyder started it with 2013’s Man of Steel:

Multiple sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 3 is not moving forward and is considered dead in its current incarnation.

It is unclear how any future Wonder Woman movie, and Gadot’s portrayal of the hero, would fit into the new DC plan.

Also unlikely is a sequel to Black Adam.

Johnson hoped to carve out his own piece of the DC pie, but multiple sources say his playing up of a returning Cavill and his own involvement with DC may not be endearing him to the new management.

In a word? Ouch.

But it’s not all bad for those who enjoyed the prior films.

One part that the Gunn-Safran agenda seems likely not to touch, at least for now, is the Matt Reeves Batman universe in which Robert Pattinson dons the cowl of the Caped Crusader. Reeves is writing the sequel to The Batman, which opened in March 4. The filmmaker is also overseeing the launch of two Batman series that spin out of his movie, including The Penguin.2

I suppose to quote Dwayne’s favorite bit of Black Adam marketing, the Hierarchy of Power has indeed changed. And unfortunately, he’s finding himself at the bottom of it.

  1. I’ll be the first to admit, Rotten Tomatoes is a terrible metric, but follow me here. ↩
  2. I’m very, VERY happy about this. ↩