One Problem with Shazam! and its Marketing

(This post contains minor spoilers for Shazam!)

Making trailers is a tough job: describing an upcoming movie’s plot, characters, and tone without giving too much away while making the audience want to see it. Shazam’s marketing did a good job of presenting the film’s main concept in a fun, entertaining and appealing way. The problem is that Shazam! is not the lighthearted, fun film that was advertised, at least not at the beginning. The very first scenes start with the backstory for the villain, not the hero, in a lot darker tone than I was anticipating. Honestly, I wondered for a moment if I was watching the wrong movie. When the hero is introduced, there are some jokes and a little bit of fun, but it’s weighed down by so much heavy melodrama that I was feeling that the film had mis-sold itself. The lightheartedness that was marketed doesn’t arrive until Billy Batson gets his powers, at least a half-hour into the film, but it honestly felt much longer (and in that regard reminded me a little too much of Venom). Even then, this was another case of a lot of the best jokes being in the trailer. Once Billy becomes Shazam, that lightheartedness doesn’t work when coupled with the extremely dark tone that surrounds the villain, Dr. Sivana. Director David F. Sandberg’s background in horror is evident, but it doesn’t work here. The boardroom scene in particular is so frightening and graphic that, for me, nothing that would follow could make up for this shocking scene. Ironically, it almost felt like it belonged more in Venom than Shazam!. While it may have been an effort to raise the stakes, it goes on for too long and reportedly frightened children. And while the PG-13 rating could be used as justification for the scene, then I feel it should not have been targeted at a younger demographic. While the third act included a pretty awesome twist with Billy’s foster family gaining Shazam powers, it was bogged down by the villain, mostly because of the bleakness it established earlier on in the movie. In my opinion, removing the boardroom scene would have helped save the film because, despite all the time invested into Dr. Sivana, he’s still a very one-note villain. While Sandberg’s horror background drove the boardroom scene, Aquaman was directed by James Wan, who’s also known for doing horror. Wan added his own horror stamp on the underwater epic in the form of the Trench and its monsters. However, the difference between these two scenes is that the Trench fits with the tone of its film. It doesn’t feel like Aquaman and Mera suddenly entered a horror movie but rather are facing another obstacle on their Indiana Jones-eqse adventure. Wan was able to keep the tone consistent, which Sandberg was not. The hospital scene in Spider-Man 2 is another case of a previous horror director, Sam Raimi, showcasing a similar type of attack on innocent people. However, this scene is tonally consistent with the rest of the film and is not nearly as graphic, even though his Evil Dead films are known for its NC-17 and R level violence. The problem with Shazam’s tonal shifts was that they weren’t what was sold, and therefore wasn’t what I was expecting. Not that the film had to be without stakes or moments of levity (some of which the film does very well in Billy’s character arc), but everything regarding Dr. Sivana is so much darker, a detailed overlooked in the trailers, which only showed him as a bad guy. The contrast made the whole experience very jarring; it felt like two different movies competing with each other. For all the talk of Shazam! taking the DCEU in a more fun direction, those scenes were far more reminiscent of the gloomier films that came before. Overall, it still felt bleaker than an average MCU film and on-par with earlier DCEU films. (SPOILERS follow!) Even though they considered the fact that the Seven Deadly Sins are the villains of the film a spoiler, perhaps briefly showing them in at least one of the trailers could have given audiences a broader scope of what the film is really like, not just the more lighthearted parts. This isn’t to say that they couldn’t have been the antagonists of the film, but they shouldn’t have been taken quite so seriously. Also, the only time their classification of being the Seven Deadly Sins matters is with Greed and Envy. Otherwise, they’re basically just monsters. Demons do fall into the category of the supernatural, but they arguably don’t fall under the same category of magic as Shazam himself, especially since they’re portrayed as demons and not just simply monsters. Even if they were still demons, they could have made the third act silly to fit the lighthearted tone that comes with Shazam. Case in point, the season three finale of the DC TV show, Legends of Tomorrow, defeats its big bad, a demon stuck in a time prison, with a giant Beebo doll, referencing an earlier episode. It’s a concept so ridiculous that it fits with the more lighthearted tone of the show. I recently rewatched the movie and enjoyed it more for the simple reason that I was more prepared for what was coming, and while the boardroom scene was still disturbing, I was able to brace myself for it. It still remains a very conflicting movie for me since there’s a lot to love, yet it is brought down because it is so dark. For instance, the fact that Billy and Shazam feel like two different characters still bothers me. If Shazam! had been marketed differently, I might have liked it more and it might have done better at the box office. Hopefully, Warner Bros. will keep this in mind for Shazam!’s sequels. While I don’t want to own this one on DVD, I am very interested in the sequel.