Source: IGN
IGN paid an exclusive visit this week to the editing bay of the upcoming action-comedy Get Smart, where we got the chance to chat with director Peter Segal about his planned feature film adaptation of Shazam!.
“One of the next movies I may be doing is a comic book: Captain Marvel… Shazam!. And that’ll be a different kind of thing [than Get Smart]. But I think in even some of the best dramas, there’s always a sense of humor that you can bring to it,” Segal began. “I’ve read some people who’ve said I’m trying to make a lighter, funny Shazam!, which is not true. I want to stay very faithful to the source material there.”
He continued, “But it is a 13-year-old boy who becomes a superhero, and I think there is an element of big in that and I think there always was in the comic book. When Stan Lee came to me many, many years ago about doing Fantastic Four and I was on – and Chris Columbus ironically as well – I was on Fantastic Four for about a year and a half, I asked Stan: ‘Why me? Why Chris Columbus originally before Chris handed it to me?’ And he said, ‘Because all of my heroes have flaws and in those flaws there’s a sense of humor and humanity.’ And that’s what he saw in some of my work. So I think that would be the common theme; no matter what the story is, if I could bring some of what I learned over the past decade or so to those kinds of stories, I think I can help tell those stories even better.”
Segal also spoke about the possibility of his Get Smart co-star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson playing the villainous Black Adam in Shazam!. “[The Rock] was great to work with. The whole cast was. And this isn’t one of those B.S. interviews where, ‘We just had a wonderful time.’ We really did have a great time. So we were looking for something else to do together. He said, ‘What are you working on?’ And I told him among other things Shazam!. And he said, ‘Do you think I can read a draft when you’re ready?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ John August is writing it and then we went on strike, so I don’t have a draft to show him yet. But I just started telling him the story and I thought that he might be a great Black Adam. And what’s fascinating now is even though the comic book was created and born in 1939 with Captain Marvel as the star, today Geoff Johns has made (Black Adam) one of the preeminent bad guys in several comics. And so that puts even more pressure on Dwayne for that role, in a good way.”
The director explained that he believes the tone of Shazam! is “going to be darker than Fantastic Four. I think it’s going to be somewhere in between. I think if you look at Peter Parker, there’s a great sense of humor he has. He’s a young boy, learning his powers. There’s so many wonderful opportunities we have in exploring not just a 13-year-old experiencing being inside the body of a superhero, but also all the emotions that go with that. Then there’s also a tragedy that he lost his parents and he’s going to one day be avenging the loss of those parents.”
Segal added, “It’s interesting because so many stories have borrowed from the original Shazam!/Captain Marvel comic book that you see very similar themes in Star Wars. And so by the time it comes back – it’s 2008 and hopefully we’ll start working on that this year – we now have to navigate through all the themes that have been borrowed from Shazam! and recreate them and make them look fresh unto themselves again. But it’s going to have a very serious tone with moments of humor and I think it’ll be somewhere in between Spider-Man and Fantastic Four.”
