Zachary Levi responds to the negative critic reviews for Shazam: Fury of the Gods, which are a lot more than the first movie.
Checking Rotten Tomatoes reveals the critic reviews for Shazam 2 are averaging 49%, while the first movie is at 90%.
Likewise, as Levi points out below, the fan response is actually better for the sequel, at 86%, compared to the first movie, which is at 82% (however, on IMDb, it’s the opposite: Fury of the Gods is at 6.0 while the first is at a 7.0).
Zachary Levi doesn’t know what the future holds for Shazam:
Zachary Levi appeared on The Film Up Podcast and offered the following:
I don’t know what the future holds for it all because, unfortunately, the second movie was not as well received. The audience score is still quite good, but the critics’ score was very oddly and perplexingly low, and people were insanely unkind.
I’ve been a part of things, and as much as I wish they were good, I know they’re okay. I know that they miss a lot. And I’m not saying ‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ is some perfect, Orson Welles-like masterpiece, but it’s a good darn movie.
I have no idea where we go from here. I just hope that or believe that history will show… it will be one of those things that people will go back, people will watch ‘Fury of the Gods’ on home streaming or on a plane or whatever, and it will be this movie that they heard so much shit about, and then they will be like, ‘Well, wait a minute.’
It should also be pointed out the first movie made only $367 million and its sequel only $133 million, so it appears as if there simply isn’t a lot of demand for Shazam, and as the first movie wasn’t a big hit at all, it should probably be questioned why a sequel was even greenlit.
Regarding the future of Zachary Levi as Shazam, Levi’s Shazam producer Peter Safran is actually rebooting the DC films universe along with James Gunn, but Gunn and Safran are going in a completely new direction, so the writing seems to be on the wall, the new DCU will be without Levi.
Update: Gal Gadot is claiming she is back for Wonder Woman 3, so that could very well mean Levi could stick around as Shazam.
