See Dwayne Johnson Join Another Billion-Dollar Franchise In New Trailer
Dwayne Johnson continues his domination of Hollywood with the trailer for this new, potentially billion-dollar franchise starter.
After having conquered professional wrestling, Dwayne Johnson conquered the world of action movies and to a somewhat lesser extent, family-friendly adventure films. At long last, he is making his debut in comic book adaptation movies with the DCEU’s Black Adam. The movie was hinted at as far back as 2019’s Shazam (which briefly showed a CGI version of him as part of a mystical vision) and Dwayne Johnson himself is essentially a one-man PR campaign. After years of Covid-19 delays, the film is set to be released soon, and accordingly, a full-length trailer has finally been released. Behold:
Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam is very much being positioned as a new tentpole character for Warner Bros. DCEU, and the trailer wastes no time in presenting him as a dark and edgy character. It begins with a futuristic-looking jet flying over snowy mountains and cuts to the silhouette of a body held in some kind of containment chamber. We see a fabulously bearded Pierce Brosnan (who plays Doctor Fate in the movie) telling Black Adam that all his powers have apparently only brought him pain and sorrow. It also becomes clear that the body is a very much alive Dwayne Johnson.
The trailer shifts to Dwayne Johnson narrating as Black Adam/Teth-Adam describing his life as a slave in the fictional land of Kahndaq thousands of years ago, and how his son sacrificed his life for him. While it does not get into the details of how he came upon the power of Shazam (nor do we see the wizard played by Djimon Hounsou), it becomes clear that Dwayne Johnson is an antihero with a lot of grittiness.
The movie goes out of its way to show Black Adam as a stoic and vengeful figure, which is interesting after Dwayne Johnson’s many years of developing himself into a fun, family-friendly figure in movies like Jumanji: The Next Level and Jungle Cruise. Black Adam also does not have the smirking, contemptuous energy that brought Dwayne Johnson success as a heel wrestler, so it could be that this movie is trying a new, dangerous version of his public persona. It certainly has a moment that grinds the entire trailer to a halt for Black Adam to tell Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) that he is prepared to kill, even if the heroes of the Justice Society of America won’t.
In addition to Dwayne Johnson as Black Adam and Aldis Hodge as Hawkman, we briefly see a golden-helmed Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate and Noah Centineo as a towering Atom Smasher. The plot of Black Adam seems to be that Dwayne Johnson is brought back to life from some kind of suspended animation and battles the JSA, but it seems likely that he will lean more towards the “hero” side of antihero before the movie is over. In addition the other members of the JSA, Black Adam stars Quintessa Swindell as Cyclone and Sarah Shahi as a professor and Kahndaq freedom fighter. Black Adam is scheduled to be released in the United States on October 21.
