Zachary Levi has shared his dismay at the critical reaction to his DC superhero sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which came out in March.
The movie, a follow-up to 2019’s Shazam!, stars Levi as a superhero in a battle of survival after vengeful gods arrive on Earth in search of the magic.
While the first film was very warmly received, the second was such a critical and financial bomb that the film’s director David F Sandberg has since vowed to leave the world of superheroes behind, at least temporarily.
During a recent appearance on The FilmUp Podcast, Levi, 42, admitted that he remains baffled by the negative reviews.
“I don’t know what the future holds for it all because, unfortunately, the second movie was not as well received,” he said. “The audience score is still quite good, but the critics score was very oddly and perplexingly low, and people were insanely unkind.”
Shazam! Fury of the Gods currently has a 49 percent critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while the audience score is 86 percent.
“I’m not saying Shazam! Fury of the Gods is some perfect, you know, Orson Welles-like masterpiece, but it’s a good darn movie,” Levi said.
In a two-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey called the film “pointless”, writing that is “feels far too messy and corporatised to have any real affection for”.
He attributed some of the negativity to social media. “Social media has shifted so much,” he said. “Hate, online hate and haters and trolls, and factions and all that has just gotten more galvanised in its toxicity.
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“I think there are people who genuinely, unfortunately, want to destroy certain projects because they don’t like them, or they don’t like me, or they don’t like other people involved in them or whatever.”
Zachary Levi at the ‘Fury of the Gods’ premiere— (AFF-USA/Shutterstock)
As for the future of the franchise, Levi said he does not have any “idea where we go from here”, but added: “I just hope that or believe that, you know, history will show that it will be one of those things that people will go back to.
“People will watch Fury of the Gods on home streaming or on a plane or whatever, and it will be this movie that they heard so much s*** about and then they will be like, ‘Well, wait a minute.’”
Levi can next be seen in The Unbreakable Boy, a film about a kid with both a rare brittle-bone disease and autism.
