DC Entertainment and Warner Bros’ released a new trailer for Shazam!, the upcoming super hero flick due out on April 5th, a month after Marvel rolls out Captain Marvel into theaters.
The trailer showcases more of Zachary Levi really getting into the Shazam character, who is basically a beefy Superman with the mind of a 15-year-old teenager.
We see him getting into hijinks as well as testing out his powers, including supersonic speed, super strength, and the ability to manipulate electricity. However, unlike other super heroes where he’s capable of mastering his abilities right out of the gate, instead Billy has some problems honing Shazam’s super powers, leading to him making a number of blunders along the way, as depicted in the trailer below from Movieclips Trailers.
The inclusion of Eminem’s “Slim Shady” seems kind of fitting, even though Eminem announced his betrayal of the white race by claiming there is a such thing as “white privilege“, which makes it seem kind of ironic to have his music playing in a trailer for a white super hero. But even still, there’s a healthy mixture of grounded realism and fantasy-themed comedy.
It’s also interesting because this movie very, very easily could have slipped into the ‘R’ rated category, with Billy not properly controlling his powers and punching people’s heads off or mutilating guys due to his uncontrollable super strength, sort of like in the comic book The Boys.
Instead, Shazam lightly roughhouses some robbers, mistakenly zaps the tires off of a bus, and manages to cause some unintended damage to cars, buildings, and public property while trying to do the right thing. His blunders help humanize him in a way that they manage to get across relatably enough within the two minute runtime of the trailer, something that every single promotional piece of Captain Marvel failed to do.
Hopefully the film strikes a proper balance between the grounded struggles of Billy’s normal life versus the not-so-glamorous hardships of wanting to be a super hero. It looks like the film is definitely on the right path, and in some ways it looks like it tries to capture the hyper-realism presented in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy but with an airy sense of comedic timing that David Sandberg tries to weave into the story with commanding presence.
We’ll see how it all comes together when the movie drops on April 5th next month. It already seems to have a lot more forward (and positive) momentum heading into its release compared to the controversial and feminist-buzzkill anthem that is Captain Marvel.