‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ Officially Finished Its Theatrical Run as the Lowest-Grossing DCEU Movie
Following the opening weekend, it was obvious that Shazam Fury of the Gods would not earn as much as its 2019 original. Following a series of unfortunate events, which became a common thing for DCEU, this movie will be remembered as the lowest-grossing movie of this franchise.
The original Shazam movie was released in 2019 as the result of WB’s plan to focus more on standalone movies in DCEU. Directed by David F. Sandberg and starring Zachary Levi in the title role, the original Shazam was praised by critics and audiences for its sense of fun, although that made it a kind of untypical movie for DC.
Of course, when the original becomes a critical and commercial success, it’s time to make a sequel. Last year we even got a spin-off movie Black Adam starring Dwayne Johnson, which didn’t perform as expected in either a commercial or critical way, and Johnson’s ambitious plan to play Black Adam in DCEU for years to come sank like Titanic on its maiden voyage.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is now officially a box-office bomb!
Regardless of Black Adam’s failure, we really expected that Shazam! Fury of the Gods might perform well, considering it’s a sequel, not an original movie, and the audience that loved the original would’ve probably paid for the ticket to see this. Unfortunately, the whole thing turned out to be a huge failure, with only $133.4 million grossed worldwide against the reported budget of $110–125 million. For comparison, the original Shazam grossed $367.7 million worldwide, and it was even cheaper than the sequel.
Not long before the movie’s release, James Gunn, a newly appointed co-CEO of DC Studios, announced that DCEU is nearing its end, and a new cinematic universe, DCU, will kick off in 2025 as the soft reboot. With that information, we bet that the fans lost any interest in these last few movies of dying DCEU, and it didn’t help that WBD didn’t even care about the movie’s commercial result.
Wonder Woman’s cameo was spoiled by the studio itself a few days before the premiere, and the movie was released digitally less than a month after its premiere in theaters. Although James Gunn is defending these last DCEU movies, we aren’t sure he cares much about these last DCEU movies, either. We can only wait to see how The Flash, Blue Beetle, and Aquaman 2, the last three DCEU movies, will perform. As for Shazam 3, we don’t believe it will ever happen, as much as we’d like to see it.
Despite its commercial failure and mixed reviews from critics, we’ll take the liberty to say that Shazam! Fury of the Gods was a lot of fun. If you haven’t seen it already, we recommend you give it a shot on May 23, when it releases on MAX, a new streaming service that will replace HBOMax on that same day.
