The SHAZAM movie that I would write
Friday, November 2nd, 2007
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is set to play Black Adam. Awesome. Great choice.
For the unitiated, SHAZAM is a story about a young boy named Billy Batson who’s given the power to turn into a very mighty superhero (basically, Superman level, power-wise) by this old wizard named Shazam. Shazam also granted another man similar power. That character was named Teth Adam or Black Adam. Black Adam “lost the way,” though.
Billy Batson becomes Captain Marvel when he goes super. The ultimate bright, smiling and not tremendously deep hero.
Black Adam is a more complicated character. Sometimes hero. Sometimes villain. A believer in “good,” but sometimes “good” is only defined as “whatever Black Adam wants.”
The beauty of the Shazam story is that both Captain Marvel and Black Adam think of themselves as “heroes,” but everyone thinks the other one is wrong from time to time. They are rivals, but not exactly enemies. It goes on a case-by-case basis.
If I were writing the SHAZAM movie, here’s the story I would write:
1 min. — Billy stumbles onto a cave, goes in, meets Shazam and gets the power of Captain Marvel.
10 min — Captain Marvel saves some kittens, fights a giant robot and an invading alien fleet and some sort of quick flicker of Dr. Sivana.
5 min — Billy Batson, 5th Grader, is assigned to do a report every week on a different country. He goes on-line, and finds stories about horrible Human Rights Abuses in different countries.
15 min — Billy changes into Capt. Marvel and tries to go to those countries to help, but whenever he gets there, things have changed, the government’s and corporation headquarters have been destroyed, things are in chaos but no one is getting abused anymore.
20 min. THEN — Billy sees something on-line about something bad RIGHT NOW. He goes there and finds Black Adam about to kill some head of state of some evil little country, like 1980s Libya, say. He tries to stop him, but Black Adam gets away with it and kills the guy.
Captain Marvel chases Adam down, and Adam won’t let him catch him, but he does admit to killing all the bad people in all those other places. Billy thinks this is wrong and tries to catch Black Adam. He fails.
5 min. Billy finds Shazam. Gets the backstory on Black Adam.
15 min… Black Adam attacks The White House. Billy goes to stop him. Black Adam is behaving very strangely. Captain Marvel wins.
Then Ibac attacks the White House, too. Captain Marvel realizes something else is going on. It’s Mr. Mind. The little worm. He figures this out somehow, goes to his lair.
20 min — He finds Black Adam in the Monster Society’s lair, somewhere. Mr. Mind has rescued him but still has him under mind control. Captain Marvel frees him and while they beat the Monster Society of Evil together (this should be a real throwdown with a lot of the classic thug characters), Captain Marvel has to let Black Adam be more brutal than he’s comfortable with and he can’t prevent him from getting away.
This could be a really great movie about a pure-hero and his anti-hero opposite and the struggle between the two. Hollywood, feel free to use this synopsis. I know it needs fleshing out, but, overall, I’m not going to lie. It pretty much rocks.
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