This past year, Warner Bros. has proven you can make a successful movie set in the Shazam! world and you can make a hit featuring a single villain (although to be fair, Joker has a lot of name recognition and notoriety). This all bodes well for the upcoming Black Adam, which has been in development for years with Dwayne Johnson attached to star. Now Warner Bros. has finally announced a release date for the movie and released a poster featuring concept art of Johnson as Black Adam.

The upcoming supervillain movie will hit theaters on December 22, 2021, a weekend that was very good to Warner Bros. last year with the release of Aquaman, and was good to Johnson a couple years ago with the release of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

For those who are unfamiliar with Black Adam, here’s a brief description via Wikipedia:

As originally depicted, Black Adam was a corrupted, ancient Egyptian predecessor of Captain Marvel [Shazam! was originally called Captain Marvel; it’s all very confusing], who fought his way to modern times to challenge the hero and his Marvel Family associates. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, Black Adam has been re-defined by DC Comics writers Jerry Ordway, Geoff Johns, and David S. Goyer as a corrupted antihero attempting to clear his name and reputation. Featured roles in such comic book series as Justice Society of America (JSA), Villains United, Infinite Crisis, and 52 have elevated the character to an unprecedented level of prominence in the overall universe of DC Comics characters.

Presumably, Warner Bros. is building to a clash between Shazam! and Black Adam, but when you’ve got a star like Dwayne Johnson doing his first comic book movie, you want to give him center stage rather than relegate him to a supporting role. Also, if you’ve got a successful Black Adam movie, that will only raise interest in Shazam 2.

Check out the full poster below via Fandango. Jaume Collet-Serra (Jungle Cruise) will direct Black Adam. For more superhero movie release dates, click here.

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