Exclusive: Dwayne Johnson Becoming Advisor To DC Studios
According to our trusted and proven sources, Dwayne Johnson is being upgraded from DC star to official advisor to the franchise.
Update November 2022: The DC Universe went a different direction with James Gunn now at the head. Dwayne Johnson isn’t considered part of the future plans.
The question of when and how Dwayne Johnson would join the world of comic book film adaptations was finally answered with the announcement of the introduction of Black Adam to the DC Extended Universe in 2014. Nearly a decade later, we are finally about to see Dwayne Johnson in action as the fallen champion of Shazam, but it seems that is not all the star is up to for DC Films. According to our trusted and proven sources, Dwayne Johnson is going to be made an official “advisor” to the new vision of DC comic book adaptations and will be heavily involved in helping guide its future.
In many ways, this makes complete sense. The DCEU has a chaotic history that just keeps getting more so, with the initial attempts to directly compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe via a shared universe of films under the stewardship of Zack Snyder falling apart around the production of 2017’s Justice League. Dwayne Johnson is entering the DC Extended Universe in the post-Snyder wave of films that seem to have tenuous connections to each other if any. Movies like the massively successful Joaquin Phoenix-starring Joker and Matt Reeves’ The Batman are in a completely independent continuity from others like the upcoming Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which is a sequel to a Snyderverse-continuity film, and HBO Max shows like Doom Patrol and Harley Quinn are in yet another continuity.
For a while, it seemed like Warner Bros was planning on focusing their releases around the HBO Max streaming platform. However, the recent cancelation of major projects by Warner Bros Discovery CEO David Zaslav and his announcement of a ten-year plan to directly backtrack on DC Films plans have completely changed expectations. Given that Dwayne Johnson is one of the biggest film stars in the world, it makes a lot of sense that DC would enlist him not just as an actor, but as a production advisor. It seems that DC Studios will be re-focusing on the idea of big, theatrical releases and on interconnected stories, which requires a lot forward planning.
Fortunately, in addition to being one of the hardest working and most prolific film stars in the world, Dwayne Johnson is known as a consummate producer and curator of his career, skills that DC Studios undoubtedly is looking to access. It has also been announced that the future of the DCEU is to be focused around Black Adam as a tentpole character, so they presumably want to give Dwayne Johnson close. Since there is quite a bit of ambiguity around the future role of Henry Cavill as Superman (traditionally the central character of DC Comics) and the personal issues of Ezra Miller, whose Flash character was also once posited as a central point of the franchise.
Given how many stops and starts the DCEU has had, bringing Dwayne Johnson on board as a potentially Kevin Feige-like mastermind is a pretty sensible choice. We shall just have to wait and see if they stay the course this time.
