The Shazam Family – or Shazamily if you prefer – are back in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, a sequel to the hit 2019 film. This time out, teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) and his adult superhero alter ego, Shazam (Zachary Levi), are being actively joined in superhero adventures by Billy’s five foster siblings, who he shared his powers with at the end of the first film. But trouble is on the horizon in the form of a trio of ancient goddesses (Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, and Rachel Zegler) who lay original claim to that power and now intend to take it back for themselves, with potentially dire consequences for humanity.
In a series with so much centered on characters gaining and possibly losing immense power, we wondered, if these kids were to reach their full potential, who would be the most powerful member of the Shazam Family and asked the community at Fandom’s DCEU Wiki in a poll – and then ran those results by the cast of the film.
Read on for what the cast and filmmakers had to say about those power levels, Fury of the Gods pitting two sets of siblings up against each other, the stealth horror moments the Shazam films include, and the potential future of the franchise, as the DCEU transforms into the DCU.
WHO’S GOT THE POWER?
Let’s not mince words here. Billy Batson, AKA Shazam himself, dominated our poll, getting 82% of the vote by the time we spoke to the cast. That’s probably not too shocking though, considering he’s the title character. So really, the big race was to see who fans felt could end up as the second most powerful member of the family after Billy.
Though Zachary Levi was amused to hear his character had so firmly come in first, he replied, “In fairness, I’m the source of the powers, so I guess I would probably have an edge, but at least how I read it in the comics — and I think the way that we’re trying to represent it — is that each one of the rest of the Shazamily have one of those powers kicked up a little bit more.”
Returning Director David F. Sandberg agreed, noting that while they discarded the earlier idea to have each family member only retain one of Billy’s powers, “They have their specialties. Darla‘s the fastest, Pedro‘s the strongest, Mary‘s the smartest…”
The cast meanwhile, had a lot of different thoughts about who would rank as the one who could be the most powerful after Billy, many jokingly arguing for themselves, though several noted Freddy’s huge desire to be a great superhero as giving him a leg up. Said Adam Brody (“Super Hero Freddy”), of Freddy, “He’s thirsty for it! he’ll put in the work and the training” and Meagan Good (“Super Hero Darla”) agreed, “He wants to learn. He wants to reach his full potential.” Levi noted there were pros and cons to Freddy’s passion though, remarking, “That can be a little bit of a kryptonite too because maybe you’re wanting it too much. But he’s got the know-how about it because he’s already been studying all the superheroes.”
Ultimately, on the poll, it was Mary who came in second after Billy, with Freddy following in third. Joked Grace Caroline Currey (“Mary Bromfield / Super Hero Mary”), when hearing this, “I think the suit kind of probably subconsciously [helped]. People were like, ‘She’s next! She’s also red! She’s also powerful!“
Currey’s costars and her director could see why she won though, with Sandberg noting, “It feels like Mary’s the smarter, more responsible one. It feels like she could really use her full potential better.”
FAMILY V FAMILY
The Shazam family’s opponents in Fury of the Gods are the Daughters of Atlas, an imposing group of goddesses made up of Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu), and Anthea (Rachel Zegler). As their name implies, this trio are sisters and Ross Butler (“Super Hero Eugene”) remarked, “You have two families going up against each other and that just ups the stakes, because not only are we a team, we’re family,” adding he especially liked that the Shazam family are not blood relatives but represent a chosen family.
The Daughters of Atlas have some notable differences from the Shazam family – certainly in terms of life experience – but Lucy Liu felt there were innate similarities as well, pointing out both groups represented “The sibling kind of hierarchies that are there,” noting, of her big screen big sister, “Like if Helen was here, we’d differ to her!”
Rachel Zegler added there were some interesting parallels between the two opposing families, saying to Liu, “You feel like your sisters are slipping away and you start gripping on really hard and it turns out not great. And Billy is doing kind of the same thing because he feels like everybody wants to go do their own thing and he’s gripping really hard.”
Zegler felt you could make additional direct character comparisons, remarking, “I feel like Freddy is Anthea and I feel like [Kalypso] and Billy are very similar. And then I feel like Hespera and Mary, there’s parallels.” When Liu said she loved these correlations, Zegler jokingly replied, “Yeah, I saw the movie… twice!”
Said Angel, of the echoes between the two sibling groups, “We both have one goal and that is to do what’s best for our families,” adding he wouldn’t describe the Daughters as evil. “I would say but they’re doing what’s best for them and we’re doing what’s best for us. And we’re both opinionated and we both have our own things that we think are right.”
Sandberg agreed you are meant to at least understand the Daughter’s perspective, explaining their presence in the film came from discussing how the Shazam family’s powers come from Gods and mythological characters. The A in Shazam in fact stands for Atlas, and Sandberg asked, “So what if they want those powers back because they were stolen from them? And that gave them such a good motivation, the villains, because you can understand that. Yeah, Shazam didn’t steal them, it’s not his fault. But they don’t really belong to him. They were stolen by someone else.”
Screenwriter Chris Morgan noted, “In the first film, Billy was so desperate to find a family and now in this film he’s terrified of losing them while he’s pitted up against the Daughters of Atlas, who have kind of had that happen. They’re a glimpse into the future a little bit. Long ago, there was a great war and a wizard stole their powers, their legacy, their world, the lives of their loved ones, and now they’ve waited and they want to get it back and not even so much for revenge, but just to restore what they believe is rightfully theirs. There’s a little bit of analogue back and forth with what Shazam is going through and where they are coming from.”
Though other storylines were considered, Morgan’s fellow screenwriter, Henry Gayden, explained, “In the end, these villains were the best way to tell a story about a character who didn’t believe he deserved his powers, because that’s exactly the perspective of our villains. And also like Chris said, they’ve experienced loss. And that is something that Billy is contending with because he is terrified of losing his family.”
THE HORROR
The Shazam films are made for audiences of all ages and built around a wish fulfillment storyline of a kid becoming a superhero but the first film surprised some with moments that were darker and more horror-adjacent than many expected – though the resume of Sandberg prior to Shazam!, which included Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation, should have been a tip off. This continues in Fury of the Gods, particularly in its third act, which involves mythological creatures who show just how vicious they are. While avoiding R-rated territory,there’s a genuine feeling of terror creeping in.
Levi said he loved that Sandberg was able to find ways to lean into his horror roots in the films, including some direct Easter eggs like an appearance by Annabelle herself (glimpsed in a pediatrician’s office in Fury of the Gods). Beyond that, he added, “You’re not going to take the genre out of the man, you know what I mean, and I think that’s part of the reason why they wanted to bring David onto direct the first one and now this one. There’s got to be an edge to this. It can’t just be a bunch of kids goofing off and being silly or you kind of lose the plot a little bit with that. It might be fun, but it’s got to have some kind of weight, it’s got to have some kind of danger and and I think that when you’re able to bring somebody like David in who already has such a great eye for the macabre and for the genre for all that it brings that extra little bit of edge and darkness that that you need to balance it.”
Currey noted that Sandberg has used Jurassic Park as a reference for how scary they are able to go and D.J. Cotrona evoked films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, saying, “it reminds me of some of Jim Henson‘s stuff, which was incredibly beautiful and fantastic for kids but they also had this very dark edge. And it’s something about that balance that is really, really fun and special.” Butler chuckled, noting, “There are jump scares in the second movie that are insane.”
Said Lucy Liu, “I think there’s a nice layer of darkness in the movie and I think it doesn’t really reach that point until the last part of it. And that’s kind of the secret [ingredient]… I think the connection that David makes with darkness and comedy really brings to life Shazam.”
Jack Dylan Grazer (“Freddy Freeman”) felt similarly and said he felt a lot of admiration for Sandberg, stating, “He never ceases to amaze me as a director, as a creative, as an imaginator. He finds a seamless way of combining and creating something between comedy and horror. That’s so natural to him. He does it in a way that doesn’t break the themes. It’s not a jarring halt. It actually feels very consistent.”
Said Sandberg, of including those beats, “I love that stuff, because you need to have a real sense of threat and danger. And I just really love monsters and horror moments like that and I always want to get as much as possible of that.”
Gayden — who wrote both films – noted he always feels encouraged to include those horror-tinged moments in the Shazam scripts, knowing Sandberg is directing. As Gayden put it, “He’s so good at that. And it’s so invaluable to the tone of the movies, because I think if we didn’t have that it would veer a little too much into sentimental or treacly or comedy. He really grounds the movie with those moments. That is one element that I don’t think we could replicate with another director.”
Good was one of several cast members to recall their surprise seeing the boardroom scene in the first Shazam, in which Sivana (Mark Strong) throws his own brother out of a window to his death before unleashing the brutal incarnations of the Seven Deadly Sins to massacre everyone in the room, his father included. Good joked that her first thought was, “‘Are we allowed to do this? There’s kids in here!’ But when you think about it, the stuff that we watched when we were kids… We were watching Halloween 4 and all kinds of stuff. I think that’s such a wonderful aspect to it, because it does remind you that it’s also for adults. And it is something that I think that it kind of takes it to the next level and pushes the envelope a little bit.”
Adam Brody remarked, “You want a director to have passion and lean into their love and their instincts and you know he’s not playing at it. He loves that genre. It comes so naturally to him and he’s at home if he can paint with that brush a little bit, so I love it.”
THE FUTURE
Though it was filmed awhile back, Shazam! Fury of the Gods is now opening as huge changes are occuring behind the scenes for Warner Bros. and DC, with James Gunn and Peter Safran taking over as the heads of DC Studios and fashioning a big new gameplan for the rechristened DC Universe, or DCU, which will take the place of what was formerly known as the DC Extended Universe.
It’s known these changes will involve some recasting – new actors will be playing Batman and Superman in the DCU, rather than retaining Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill – though not everything is changing, since even after this summer’s The Flash, which is the film that is expected to provide an in-universe “reset,” we’ll get the already filmed Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, with Jason Momoa back in the title role. And perhaps even more notably, given it’s not a project produced before he and Safran took over, Gunn has announced Viola Davis will continue to play Amanda Waller in the DCU.
All of which leaves the Shazam films and cast in flux, as it is certainly possible they could continue on as this current incarnation of the family but there is no confirmation yet on whether they will. The cast have the same questions we all do, but Ross Butler remarked, “The Shazam universe has so many so many places we can go.”
In Fury of the Gods, we get some glimpses at the huge hall of doors beneath Shazam family’s lair, all of which lead to different realities, and Butler added, “With the hall of doors, literally there is an infinite universe of what we can do. And all of our characters… We’re such a big ensemble, and they’re all so different. I really hope that we do continue. There’s a lot to mine.”
Said Sandberg, of his conversations with the new regime, “They’ve told me that since Shazam has been kind of separate – the story hasn’t really been intertwined with the rest of DC – that there’s nothing in these movies that interfere or contradict anything they’re planning as they go forward. So you could make more Shazam movies. It could still exist in the universe. We’ll see!”
Shazam! Fury of the Gods opens March 19.
