Yesterday, Warner Bros. and DC Entertainment announced a slew of new release dates, including one for the long-in-development The Flash movie for July 1, 2022.
One of the movies noticeably missing from recent announcements was a sequel to this year’s pleasant surprise of a superhero movie, Shazam!, but that’s been corrected with Shazam 2 now being scheduled for April 1, 2022. That’s just three short months before The Flash.
Zachary Levi will be back in the crimson spandex for the title role, and director David F. Sandberg is expected to return, working from a screenplay by Henry Gayden, who also wrote the first movie. Since producer Peter Safran is also involved, we have to expect that much of the rest of the original cast will also return.
Going by the end scene tag of Shazam!, the movie will feature Shazam’s arch-villain Mr. Mind, but with Dwayne Johnson‘s Black Adam hitting theaters on December 22, 2021, might that set-up that villain’s first confrontation with Levi’s Shazam?
2022 will then be filled out by James Wan‘s Aquaman 2 sequel, so it certainly feels like Warner Bros. is finally getting it together in terms of its shared universe… even if they haven’t yet dared to try to make a sequel to Zack Snyder‘s ill-fated Justice League movie just yet.
Shazam! was a relatively small hit by today’s superhero standards, grossing just $140.4 million in North America and another $224.2 million overseas. (That’s only a little more in total globally than Avengers: Endgame made in its opening weekend, just in North America!)
Even so, critics seemed to like the movie, as it seemed to offer something lighter from the typical DCEU movies.
An April Fool’s Day release could be particularly great for marketing the comedic superhero sequel.
