Years ago, when I heard that DC came up with the idea of making a Black Adam movie with Dwayne as the lead actor, I was extremely hyped. I always imagined him as the perfect cast for Black Adam. There was another news that Henry Cavill would be back as Superman once again. The Rock kept saying, “The hierarchy of power in DC is about to change.” I thought, finally! DC movies will rise again, and Black Adam will be the savior. But after a month of its theatrical release, Black Adam appeared as a box office bomb. With a production budget of $190-260 million, Black Adam barely made it to $393.5 million.
This fall was disappointing but not unexpected. After the release, we could see the flop coming based on a couple of factors. And in this article, I’ll pinpoint four of those factors that caused the failure of Black Adam.
If you look at the box office collection, the number isn’t that bad for an origin movie of a marginal DC antihero like Black Adam. But the problem is that the production cost was too big for the movie. Man of Steel (2013), Iron Man 3 (2013), Spider-Man 2 (2004), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), The Batman (2022), etc., are some examples of successful superhero movies with budgets around $200 million. If you look closely, you’ll realize that all these movies are either sequels of hit movies or feature super popular characters.
My point is, Black Adam isn’t a famous character. I mean, if you are a DC fan, you obviously know Black Adam, but it’s not the same for the mass audience. It was a bad decision to bring such a character to the big screen while investing that amount of money. Even a movie featuring his archnemesis, Shazam!, which is a relatively more popular character, made less money at the box office ($367 million), yet it turned out to be a hit because of its modest budget ($100 million). Black Adam, on the other hand, with its huge production budget and marketing costs, needed to reach $600 million just to break even.
Now, how often do you see a solo superhero origin film earning more than $600 million unless it’s Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man? See what I mean?
Unfamiliar Characters
As I mentioned earlier, Black Adam is not a popular superhero, and the same goes for the other characters in the movie. Characters like Doctor Fate, Atom Smasher, Hawkman, or SABBAC might be familiar to comic nerds, but most movie audiences don’t know any of them. The movie failed to introduce them with proper depth and backstory (more on that later). As a result, the audience didn’t feel a connection to these characters. That’s another reason why Black Adam couldn’t attract a larger audience. Of course, there was Henry Cavill’s Superman cameo and Dwayne Johnson’s stardom to grab attention initially, but we all know these factors are not enough to create massive hype among the masses. And that surely had a negative impact on the box office collection.
Bad Writing
Man! I guess literally every flop movie has this in common. Black Adam has some serious issues with its bad writing on so many levels. I’m going to mention three of them that bothered me the most:
Protagonist
The character of Black Adam is written terribly. He doesn’t have any purpose at all. He does literally nothing until the plot throws something at him. Let me explain. After being freed/awakened by Isis, he does nothing until one of the Intergang members points a gun at him. After vanquishing a bunch of Intergang members, he has nothing to do until the Justice Society of America (JSA) attacks him. He kills Ishmael after he kidnaps the kid. He goes to sleep under Amanda Waller’s prison until SABBAC appears. He wakes up, escapes, and tears SABBAC apart. You see, Black Adam doesn’t have any purpose or motivation at all. Everything he does is led by some other character, not by his choice or interest, because he has literally nothing to do. That’s a really terrible way to write a superhero protagonist’s character.
Villain
The villain character is written even worse. Why does Ishmael become a villain in the first place? Because his 5,000-year-old ancestor was one? Does that make any sense? If he knew that the magic of the Champion (being killed by Black Adam) would take him to the “Rock of Finality,” then why didn’t he get himself killed when he first met Black Adam? Also, why does he want to become SABBAC and be invincible? For what purpose? This Ishmael or SABBAC character doesn’t have any specific goal or motivation in the movie. He serves no purpose in the story except being the unnecessary third-act CGI villain. Let alone uncover his backstory—the movie doesn’t even explain that SABBAC is an acronym of six different demons, just like SHAZAM. He feels like a joke in the movie.
Justice Society of America
In the movie, we get to see four of the Justice Society of America’s members: Doctor Fate, Hawkman, Atom Smasher, and Cyclone. And it was disappointing for the audience to see JSA members being used as some sort of backdrop to Black Adam’s story or as a plot device for the movie, rather than having their own fleshed-out narratives. Especially Atom Smasher and Cyclone, who barely had any space throughout the whole movie. The movie introduced four completely new superheroes, which would have been a plus point for the DCEU with proper character development, but they failed in that big time. Doctor Fate became DC’s version of Doctor Strange, and Atom Smasher is Ant-Man with a Deadpool mask. And that’s just a big mess.
Bad Release
Black Adam was somewhat unlucky with its release. The movie came out in October 2022, when the whole cinema industry was still recovering from the effects of COVID-19. A large number of audiences who used to watch movies in theaters had shifted their habits to Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming sites. No doubt Black Adam lost some of its potential audience because of that. It’s no wonder the movie appeared on online streaming platforms so early (within two months of its theatrical release).
Also, Black Adam wasn’t released in China, one of the biggest markets by box-office revenue. I’m not saying that Black Adam could have avoided disaster if it had been released in China, but a collection of $50-100 million there would have lessened the damage.
