[This story contains spoilers for Shazam! Wrath of the Gods.]
If that Shazam’s final end credits scene! Wrath of the Gods looks familiar, and as it should.
After meeting the daughters of Atlas – Hespera (Helen Mirren), Calypso (Lucy Liu) and Anthea (Rachelle) Ziegler) – After a long battle – the DC sequel ends with Billy Batson (Asher Angel/Zachary Levi ) and Shazam! The family comes together safely to rebuild their home after being destroyed in the final battle. They both regain their powers, and Billy finally learns his true superhero name – Shazam, apparently. There are two post-credits sequences once the credits appear in Levi’s likely final outing as a superhero.
The final credits scene recalls the promise of credits In the first film, Doctor Sivana (Mark Strong) plots revenge against an unexpected visitor in his cell—Mr. Mind, a supervillain worm with a robot-like voice who is the main Shazam! Enemies from the manga.
This time, the scene opens again to Mister Mind meeting Sivana. Two years have passed since the events of the first movie, and Sivana has been patiently waiting for the worm genius to help him break out of his cell so he can exact revenge on Billy.
“Where the hell have you been?” Sivana exclaimed. “I was stuck in a concrete box surrounded by lunatics, waiting for a bug to show up.” Mr Mind went on to explain that despite his natural talents and telepathic abilities, gliding took time. He has no legs or wings, which understandably makes travel difficult.
While the sequel may have originally intended to focus on Mister Mind as the villain, co-writer Henry Gaydon and Chris Morgan ultimately chose to walk a different path by introducing Atlas’ Daughter route. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Gayden revealed that the final credits scene for Fury of the Gods begins as A fun writing exercise.
“I really had the pleasure of writing this article,” said the author. “Nobody asked me to write that. We’d done all these Mister Mind and Sivana drafts and ended up discarding them. Randomly, I thought, well, it’s so sad to lose them,” recalls Gaydon. “So for fun, as a joke, I wrote that. Then a few months passed and we got into pre-production, and I was like, should we make it into the end credits?”
Gayden recalls former DC Films boss Walter Hamada “had forgotten about it, but was like, ‘This is the best thing you’ve ever written.'”
As it turns out, there are even earlier script drafts for the sequel, in which Mister Mind and Sivana teamed up.
“There is a scene where Sivana escapes from prison without lifting a finger with the help of Mr. Mind, one of my favorite scenes I’ve ever written One,” the writer said. “There’s great stuff in there, but none of it really serves Billy’s natural upbringing. It feels a bit redundant. It feels like we’re doing the final movie on a larger scale.”
Instead, he and Morgan wanted to focus on family issues and what it meant to us Billy, which had never been done before.
“The natural next chapter is that he’s going to hang on too hard because he’s afraid of losing that family,” Gaydon said.
Instead, it makes more sense to introduce a villain in Daughters of Atlas.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods arrives at a time when DC is changing. James Gunn and Shazam! Producer Peter Safran was named last year to lead the studio’s film, TV and animation efforts, and Shazam! — such as Henry Cavill’s Superman — are excluded from their OUTSOLVED Slate coming soon. The future of the franchise hangs in the balance despite the soft box office upcoming gods Wrath affects the possibility of a sequel.
Still, if the co-writers are going to continue the franchise, Gayden would like the possibility of seeing Doctor Sivana and Mr. Mind finally have their moment in the sun. “If we had Shazam! 3 , it would be fun if we could bring them back,” Gaydon said.
Added author: “Also, if we had Shazam! 3 we’d take a different approach to villains line, I always wanted the end credits to continue to be Sivana and Mister Mind. I just thought it was a Shazam! The credits always make jokes about the credits, I thought that would be funny.”
