Shazam! Captain Marvel has left the building

John August is the screenwriter who has been working on Shazam!, the big-screen adaptation of the DC comic character Captain Marvel since 2007. He has recently posted an article about the whole process. This is his description of the character:

Captain Marvel is a superhero roughly as powerful as Superman, minus the heat-vision and cold breath. What’s unique about the character is that in ordinary life, he’s teenager Billy Batson. Speaking the name of the wizard who gave him his powers (Shazam) calls down a magic thunderbolt, transforming him into the studly superhero. But he’s still a teenager in there.

If this to you sounds, “Like Big, but with superpowers,” then congratulations! You now understand Hollywood.

His script has gone through a number of changes due to different studios involvement, writers strikes etc. The first draft was

...a comedy with a lot of action. It mostly centers on Billy Batson getting and learning how to use his powers, and discovering what happened to his parents that left him an orphan. One of the appeals of the project is that Billy is a comic book hero who actually reads comic books.

Warner Bros then got hold of the rights and John writes

When we turned the new draft in to the studio, we got a reaction that made me wonder if anyone at Warners had actually read previous drafts or the associated notes. The studio felt the movie played too young. They wanted edgier. They wanted Billy to be older. They wanted Black Adam to appear much earlier. (I pointed out that Black Adam appears on page one, but never got a response)

He then wrote one final draft

I took them at their (written) word and delivered what they said they wanted: a much harder movie, with a lot more Black Adam. This wasn’t “Big, with super powers” anymore. It was Black Adam versus Captain Marvel, with a considerable push into dark territory and liminal badlands like Nanda Parbat. It wasn’t the action-comedy I’d signed on to write, but it was a movie I could envision getting made. The producer and director liked it, and turned it in to the studio while I was in France.

By the time I got back, the project was dead.

By “dead,” I mean that it won’t be happening. I don’t think it’s on the studio’s radar at all. It may come back in another incarnation, with another writer, but I can say with considerable certainty that it won’t be the version I developed.

So it looks as if the Big Red Cheese won't be in the cinema's anytime soon. Check out the full article over on John August's blog as it's a cracking read and he has many more articles and tips for any scriptwriters out there.

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