He might be putting on a brave face publicly, but there’s no way Dwayne Johnson isn’t somewhere between fuming and devastated after it was confirmed Black Adam wouldn’t be changing the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe after all, with James Gunn and Peter Safran having no place for the recently-debuted antihero in their plans for the future of the franchise.
In all honesty, it’s a professional embarrassment for the actor and producer, and not just because he’d spent 15 years trying to get the comic book adaptation made in the first place. The prospect of the world’s biggest and most popular movie star taking top billing in a blockbuster rooted in the industry’s most bankable genre reads like a license to print money, but it simply wasn’t to be.