ROCK ‘N' RULE

Dwayne Johnson’s badass Black Adam explodes into the DCEU – and the box office – like a bolt of lightning in 2022. The star/producer/Adam nerd and his director tell Total Film how Kahndaq’s fierce ruler promises to shake up power dynamics, disrupt the comic-book landscape and deliver the event movie of the year.

- JANE CROWTHER

Dwayne Johnson closes his eyes and sits quietly for a minute. It’s like he’s evoking an incantation – and in a way, he is. Through his own concentrated will he’s finally ushering one of DC’s most powerful, complex and disruptive antiheroes to the big screen after a decade of patience and power play. Now TF sits and waits as the star, in his office at his LA home, contemplates what moment in the movie he cannot wait for fans to finally see. He takes a deep breath. “Two things,” he intones, eyes opening. “The opening action sequence, of an entire army trying to take out Black Adam and he starts to levitate... What happens after that is fucking incredible. I’m sorry to cuss – but you establish within the first opening minutes who this man is, his power and him being unstoppable. And there is of course a moment where Black Adam screams, “Shazam!” Oh, I have goosebumps now… Then they all pay when that happens.”

Let’s talk about that man and that power then. A character in the Marvel Family #1 comic in 1945 (and then various iterations since), Black Adam was introduced to movie audiences during a brief show-and-tell segment in 2019’s Shazam! and was originally intended to appear within that storyline. An ancient Egyptian slave-turned-leader fuelled by grief and rage after a family tragedy, Adam has powers as mighty as Superman’s but none of the peacekeeping sensibilities. He doesn’t share his power like Billy Batson and metes out justice with an iron fist – ‘kneel at his feet or get crushed by his boot’.