The conspiracy theorists out there were happy to point the finger of blame squarely in the direction of James Gunn, and while it’s certainly hinted that the new co-CEO of DC Studios had a party to play, Dwayne Johnson – with incredible irony – seems to be blaming the entire hierarchy of power at Warner Bros. for the implosion of Black Adam.
The would-be start of an entire corner of the shared universe scored the biggest opening weekend of Johnson’s career for a project where he plays the lead role, it brought back Henry Cavill’s Superman to set up a showdown for the ages, and still ranks as the highest-grossing DCU movie to release since 2018.
And yet, while reflecting on the Man in Black crumbling into dust while talking to Kevin Hart, The Rock admitted that the constant shuffling of top executives didn’t do him or his saga any favors.
“I think that Black Adam got caught in a vortex of new leadership. It was so many changes in leadership. Anytime you have a company, a publicly-traded company, and you have all those changes in leadership, you have people coming in who creatively, fiscally, are going to make decisions that you may not agree with, philosophically.”
Johnson had laid the groundwork for Black Adam sequels, a Justice Society spin-off, a hotly-anticipated brawl opposite Cavill’s Man of Steel, all while bringing several new superheroes into the fold, but at the end of the day he spent 15 years sticking with the project through thick and thin to be rewarded with the square root of nothing.