I quite enjoyed Black Adam for what it was. It’s a shame that with its timing it will forever be overshadowed by Wakanda Forever. There’s some alternate timeline out there where they didn’t come out a month apart from each other where Black Adam had a chance for larger recognition, which gets to my weird impression of this aside:

by which I’m assuming: for the Shazam movie to come out, and for Zack Snyder’s dominance over the DCEU to fade

My impression/understanding of the order of the projects is that this is actually somewhat the opposite: to what I heard, Black Adam was a project Snyder helped fight for and his original plan was Black Adam, then Shazam, then some rumored story ideas for Black Adam 2 (Black Adam versus Shazam, likely). Allegedly he promised the whole thing as a trilogy to The Rock in that fashion.

I find that very believable situation because Black Adam is the sort of hero that Snyder seemed to best understand and making him the main character of the “trilogy” kind of makes sense in the same ways Snyder was usually bad at planning film chronology: lightly confusing event chronology (the events of Black Adam do all occur before Shazam) with good storytelling telling order or the order of the story in the comics.

From what I heard in rumor sources it was the first couple shakeups in Snyder’s control of the plan (in the behind the scenes hiccups around Batman v. Superman) that led the way for Aquaman to move forward with less overall Snyder control and swapped the order of Shazam and Black Adam for multiple reasons (including despite contract locking The Rock they were dumb enough to not include requisite shooting time in that contract and obviously he was keeping very busy with F&F movies and Jumanji and Moana and Jungle Cruise and the list goes on).

So yeah, as I heard it, Black Adam was like the second or third Snyderverse film written. It was obviously written after Man of Steel and there’s debate on whether its first draft finished before or after BvS, mostly to do with how rushed you believe the BvS scripting process was in reality.

My takeaway is that Black Adam felt very much “the last Snyderverse film” to me and strangest still that it was one of the first, it just was also the longest trapped in development.

That leads me back to where I started: I kind of wonder if in some alternate timeline Snyder’s plan had been handed to the right sort of business nerd who took one look at The Rock’s contract and decided they needed to solve the problem of The Rock’s availability ASAP and actually made Black Adam in parallel to BvS and released just before or after BvS if that would have been mind blowing.

Black Adam’s script felt lukewarm at moments the way in our timeline it was sandwiched between the double “Marvel did it better” one/two punch of Moon Knight and Wakanda Forever, but if it truly was written shortly after Man of Steel (as many things implied) and was actually developed at that point back then, that’s probably a very interesting alternate timeline. I think that timeline would have delivered a worse Shazam movie in trying to keep it a sequel to Black Adam. I think it might have delivered a better Justice League with an actual Justice Society to set table stakes and a reason for them being mostly broken (from the events in Black Adam) and needing a “League reform”. Also that timeline possibly missed out on Moana. I’m very curious about that alternate timeline still though.