Zachary Levi as Shazam, Meagan Good and Ross Butler.
Warner Bros. / Courtesy of Everett Collection
(This story contains spoilers for Shazam! Fury of the gods.)
If this final scene of the end credits Shazam! Fury of the gods looked familiar, it was supposed to.
After a long battle against the daughters of Atlas – Hespera (Helen Mirren), Kalypso (Lucy Liu), and Anthea (Rachel Zegler) – the DC sequel ends with Billy Batson (Asher Angel/Zachary Levi) and the Shazam! family safely, rebuilding their home after it was destroyed in the final fight. They’ve all regained their powers, and Billy finally learns his real superhero name – it’s Shazam, obviously. And once the credits roll on what is potentially Levi’s final outing as a superhero, there are two ending credits sequences.
The final end-credits scene recalls the post-credit promises of the first film, which featured Doctor Sivana (Mark Strong) plotting revenge in his prison cell with an unlikely visitor – Mister Mind, a supervillain worm with a robotic voice which is an important Shazam! comic book enemy.
This time, the scene opens with the meeting of Mister Mind and Sivana. Two years have passed since the events of the first film, and Sivana patiently waits for the worm genie to help him out of his cell, so he can exact revenge on Billy.
“Where the hell have you been?” Sivana exclaims. “I’m stuck in a concrete box, surrounded by lunatics, waiting for a worm.” Mister Mind then explains that despite his genius and telepathic powers, crawling takes time. It has no legs or wings, which naturally makes it difficult to move.
While the sequel may have originally planned to focus on Mister Mind as the villain, co-writers Henry Gayden and Chris Morgan ultimately chose to go a different route by featuring the daughters of Atlas. In a recent interview with The Hollywood ReporterGayden revealed that the Fury of the gods‘ The final credits scene started out as a fun writing exercise.
“I wrote this really about a lark,” said the writer. “No one asked me to write this. We had done all these drafts of Mister Mind and Sivana, and we had finally thrown them away. And so randomly, I was like, well, it’s so sad to lose them,” Gayden recalled. “So for fun, as a joke, I wrote this. Then the months go by, and we go into pre-production, and I thought, should we shoot this as a post-credits thing?”
Gayden recalls former DC Films boss Walter Hamada “forgetting about it, but thinking, ‘This is the best thing you’ve ever written. “”
Turns out there were still earlier versions of the sequel script where Mister Mind and Sivana teamed up.
“There’s a scene where Sivana breaks out of jail without having to lift a finger with the help of Mister Mind, which is one of my favorite scenes I’ve written,” the writer said. . “There were some great things there, but none of it really served any natural growth for Billy. It was kind of redundant. It felt like we were doing the last movie on a grander scale.
Instead, he and Morgan wanted to focus on the matter of family and what it would mean for Billy, who had never had one before.
“The next natural chapter would be that he’s going to hold on too much because he’s terrified of losing this family,” Gayden said.
Instead, it made more sense to introduce villains who themselves were part of the Atlas Girls family.
Shazam! Fury gods comes at a time of change for DC. James Gunn and Shazam! Producer Peter Safran was tapped last year to spearhead the studio’s film, television and animation efforts, and Shazam! – like Henry Cavill’s Superman – was left out. The future of the franchise is up in the air, although the soft box office is coming for Fury of the gods hurts the likelihood of a sequel.
Still, if the co-writers were to continue the franchise, Gayden would potentially like to see Doctor Sivana and Mister Mind to possibly have their moment in the sun. “If we have Shazam! 3it will be fun if we can bring them back,” Gayden said.
The writer added: “But also, if we had Shazam! 3 and we go a different route with the bad guys, I always wanted the post-credits to continue to be Sivana and Mister Mind. I just thought it was the flavor of Shazam!, the fact that he’s a little low-key pokes fun at the films’ tropes. If the post-credit scene still makes fun of the post-credit scenes, I think that could be really fun.