Lucy Liu has been cast in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and director David F. Sandberg has celebrated online with a funny image referencing her role in Kill Bill. Liu will be playing the villain Kalypso in the Shazam! sequel, daughter of the god Atlas and sister to Helen Mirren’s Hespera. Asher Angel and Zachary Levi are both returning for Shazam! 2, which is scheduled for a theatrical release on June 2, 2023.
Upon its release in 2019, Shazam! was greeted with the best reception of any DCEU film since Wonder Woman. Its success was largely due to the film’s more comedic side, which helped separate it from the darker films that preceded it. Angel and Levi were both highly praised for their performances, as was costar Jack Dylan Grazer. The Dwayne Johnson-led Black Adam film, slated for release on July 29, 2022, will be set in the same universe, building out the story in preparation for Shazam! 2.
The addition of Lucy Liu to the cast of Shazam! Fury of the Gods has been widely celebrated, and director David F. Sandberg shared his own appreciation for the star in a funny way. A notorious troll on Twitter, Sandberg posted a picture of Liu’s O-Ren Ishii character from Kill Bill Vol. 1 – specifically, the iconic scene where she decapitates Jun Kunimura’s Tanaka. Sandberg’s image splices in Zachary Levi’s severed head in place of Tanaka’s, jokingly foreshadowing a shocking dark turn for the series.
Shazam! 2 will hopefully have the same lighthearted tone of the original, but will inevitably feel different as the third entry in a growing superhero franchise. Black Adam is introducing a number of characters from the Justice Society of America, including Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan). That cast, combined with the characters of Shazam! and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, could spawn numerous future spinoffs.
Of course, many of those new characters aren’t nearly as well known as DC’s usual picks for live-action adaptations. The Suicide Squad is hoping to find its own success with an ensemble of more obscure comics characters later this year, possibly marking a turn away from the franchise’s most popular heroes. Those characters are still alive and well in recent films like Wonder Woman 1984 and upcoming releases like The Batman and The Flash, but leaning into more ancillary corners of DC’s mythos could be a great choice for Black Adam, Shazam! 2, and the DCEU as a whole.
Source: David F. Sandberg
