While Warner Bros. recently announced months-long delays for many DC Extended Universe films, Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t one of them.
Per Deadline, the highly anticipated sequel to Shazam! is moving up four and a half months from its June 2, 2023 release date. The film will be out just in time for the holiday season, now premiering in theaters on Dec. 16, 2022.
Like many pandemic-era films, Shazam! Fury of the Gods endured several delays due to the COVID-19 crisis. The movie was originally intended to open on April 1, 2022, which was then pushed to Nov. 4. It was then delayed again, receiving its most recent June 2, 2023 date. Now, interestingly, the film will premiere closer to its second release date after having wrapped production in August 2021.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a direct sequel to 2019’s Shazam!, which moved the DCEU in a decidedly lighter and more family-friendly direction after the franchise’s darker entries of the mid-2010s. Through a series of mystical events, Foster teen Billy Batson gains the ability to transform into Shazam (Zachary Levi), a beefy adult superhero. By the end of the film, Billy shares his powers with the rest of his foster family, allowing each to turn into their own grown-up hero. Shazam! proved to be a critical and commercial success, and a sequel from returning director David F. Sandberg was quickly confirmed.
Fury of the Gods will follow Billy and his super-family as they team up against some formidable new foes. Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu will play new characters Hespera and Kalypso, respectively. Mirren recently let slip that West Side Story‘s Rachel Zegler will join her and Liu as the third goddess who will make up their villainous trio.
No footage from the upcoming sequel has been released yet, though Sandberg recently teased a possible Fury of the Gods trailer release date. The director suggested the footage could drop for the next DC FanDome, a yearly celebration where the company announces new content and shares first looks at upcoming projects. Considering the two previous FanDomes took place in August 2020 and October 2021, fans could see a trailer as early as the summer.
Shazam! is already a hot ticket for DCEU fans, but according to star Levi, Fury of the Gods will impress even more than the first film. “I will say that I genuinely — and this is not just lip service — I’m really proud of the first one, I think we made a really, really good movie,” Levi said in December 2021. “I think the second one is better. I think that we had more time, we had more budget. We had, essentially, the entire cast returning, and we all knew our characters a little bit more; we could kind of sit into them a little bit more.”
Source: Deadline
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