As of this typing, Shazam: Fury of the Gods is on track for a domestic box office opening worth $30.5 million, which would make it #1 for the weekend. That might sound good… except that it’s a tentpole franchise release on over 4,000 screens, made with a reported budget of $125 million. By those standards, a $30.5 million opening weekend could charitably be described as dismal.

But even in the best-case scenario, the future of the Shazam film series would still be depressingly bleak for reasons that have nothing to do with the box office gross.

To start with, there’s the ongoing clusterfuck of David Zaslav’s tenure as CEO of Warner Bros Discovery. This is the same schmuck who casually blurted in a recent shareholders meeting that “Mortal Kombat 12” — a hotly anticipated game that still hasn’t technically been announced by WBD subsidiary NetherRealm Studios — would be coming out later this year. In that same meeting, shareholders learned that A) new Lord of the Rings content is on the way, B) HBO Max is up 1.1 million subscribers from last year, and C) their Q4 losses are somewhere north of $2 billion.

In other words, A) they’ve got all this amazing IP, B) they’ve got a thriving consumer base, and C) the stock value is dropping. In short, “SOMEBODY PLEASE BUY US OUT!!!”

While all this is going on, WBD finally carved out their DC film holdings into DC Studios, headed up by the team of James Gunn and Peter Safran. For clarity, Gunn is the one who comes out to make all the big flashy announcements and write/direct the next Superman attempt; while Safran is the one who comes out to tell everyone that Ezra Miller deserves another chance, the Batgirl movie was unsalvagably bad, and there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Yes, Gunn and Safran came out recently with their “Gods and Monsters” lineup, outlining the first chapter of the new DC Cinematic Universe, while everything else (like the Reeves/Pattinson Batman franchise and the Joaquin Phoenix Joker movies) will be produced under a new “Elseworlds” label out of canon. All well and good. Trouble is, while the upcoming Gunn/Safran master plan was met with much fanfare, its earliest entries won’t be out until 2025. How will that plan be affected by The Flash, Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom, Blue Beetle, or any other DC film project to be released in the meantime? How does any of this fit in with the C-suite’s ongoing efforts to sell the conglomerate? What happens if the company is sold or there’s a new change in management before 2025, and how might the new overlords affect all of this? Right now, we can only speculate.

Then there’s the matter of Dwayne Johnson. The man who spent nearly two decades trying to recenter the DC Universe around himself and Black Adam. Then the movie tanked and a long list of tabloid news stories came out detailing all sorts of behind-the-scenes conflicts between Johnson and the PTB at WBD. How much of it is true? Who’s at fault? Who can say? But even without any insider knowledge, a few things are readily apparent.

Consider Black Adam and DC League of Superpets. Both were starring vehicles for Exec Producer Dwayne Johnson, and both featured Black Adam in some capacity, but neither of them mentioned Shazam in any way. In fact, both movies had mid-credits stingers that directly set up impending conflicts between Black Adam and Superman.

Why pretend that Black Adam isn’t the prime nemesis for Shazam when that’s been his main purpose since the character was first introduced 80 years ago? Why set him up to clash with a different hero entirely? For that matter, why position Black Adam as an antagonist for Superman, a hero who already has dozens of more iconic and compelling rogues to choose from?

Well, I’m sure it’s a factor that Shazam has been living and toiling in Superman’s shadow since the day of his inception. And it must have crossed Johnson’s mind that throwing down with the highest-profile character in the DC canon (with the debatable exception of Batman) would raise his own profile and Black Adam’s notoriety far more than the showdown with Shazam that only the comic fans actually care about. Oh, and we can’t forget that Superman actor Henry Cavill is represented by Dany Garcia, ex-wife to Johnson and sister to his business partner Hiram Garcia.

In any case, Black Adam tanked, Cavill got ousted, and a whole lot of dirty laundry got aired about Johnson’s business dealings with WB. Regardless of the limp-wristed glad-handing with all parties insisting that everything’s cool and they’ll find some other project to work on, Johnson has clearly done enough damage and burned enough bridges at WBD that we’re not seeing Shazam fight with Black Adam onscreen anytime soon. This makes the entire live-action Shazam film series feel like a broken promise. It’s like a Batman who never faces off with the Joker or an X-Men series without Magneto: What’s even the point?

Then we have the actors who are directly involved with the Shazam movies. And I’m not even talking about Zachary Levi, though he is facing significant backlash over some recent anti-vaxxer sentiments. Frankly, I knew something was up when Levi took the lead role in American Underdog — I’m not saying everyone who stars in a Kingdom Story Company picture is a raging uber-conservative asshole, but it’s a red flag nonetheless.

No, the big problem here is with the child actors. It’s nothing personal, nothing they’ve said or done, and nothing they can help with. It’s just the nature of the property itself.

Remember that Shazam was built from the ground up as a power fantasy for young kids. The title character is literally a child who transforms into a full-grown superhero. Any live-action franchise built on that premise was destined for a tragically brief shelf life, and the COVID shutdown only made that shelf life shorter.

Asher Angel was born in 2002. That means he was 16 when the first movie was in production, and he’s 21 as of this typing. He’s inevitably going to age out of this role any day now, if he hasn’t already. Even as it is, they already swapped out Michelle Borth for the sequel (with Grace Caroline Currey stepping in to play Ms. Marvel), and Billy’s other foster siblings will also need recasting in short order.

Let’s review. If this franchise has any future, it would have to find a way forward through a nebulous labyrinth of shifting corporate interests in which future plans and the people who make them are still in constant flux. If that happens and a third movie goes ahead, a showdown with Black Adam is off the table and the best we can hope for is a payoff to the first end credits stinger, in which the Marvel Family takes on Mark Strong and a telepathic CGI alien worm. And if all that happens, we can either recast the child characters we’ve come to know and love over the past two movies and hope the franchise holds together; or we can follow the kids through college and hope the fundamental premise holds together.

Is it possible we could get a third movie out of all this? Well, that might not be impossible, but it’s quite improbable. Is it possible that such a third movie could be a satisfying trilogy capper if these are our options? I’d say that’s even less likely.

Now, you might argue that all of this only concerns the hypothetical future of the franchise and has nothing to do with the two movies we actually have. Alas, that’s only true to a point. Remember, we’re dealing with a tentpole franchise here, and a crucial function of any tentpole movie is to advertise its sequel. I know that sucks, and that’s not to say a tentpole movie can’t be enjoyable on its own merit, but it’s the nature of the beast. If a big franchise movie sets up a sequel that doesn’t come, or if the sequel turns out to be awful, that tends to retroactively and adversely affect judgment of the film itself. I know that’s not fair, but history has shown that this is how it is.

Regardless, Shazam: Fury of the Gods is in theaters now and I’ll review it when I can find the time.