OTTplay Now You Know - Lesser-known facts about Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Zachary Levi and the ‘Shazam’ family feature in the sequel to David F Sandberg’s 2019 hit Shazam!. The new film Shazam! Fury of the Gods revolves around Billy Batson aka Shazam and his foster siblings as they try to thwart the evil plans of new adversaries who call themselves the Daughters of Atlas. For today’s Now You Know we take a look at lesser-known facts about Shazam! Fury of the Gods which will be available to stream on OTT in India from the 18th of April, 2023.

1. It’s famously known that this film’s director David F. Sandberg is renowned for his horror films, most notably the 2017 film Annabelle: Creation which made the back of our neck crawl. In Shazam! Fury of the Gods, only eagle-eyed viewers would’ve spotted the infamous Anabelle doll lying on a chair at the paediatrician’s office at the beginning of the film. Coincidentally, both films also star Grace Caroline Currey, who plays the role of Mary Bromfield in the Shazam! sequel.
2. The film features a building called the ‘Fulci Center for the Performing Arts’. And it has now been revealed by director David F. Sandberg that the name of the building is a homage to renowned Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci. Fulci is known among film students for his spine-chilling horror films such as Murder-Rock: Dancing Death and The House by the Cemetery.
3. Only loyal fans of the franchise may know this but Shazam! Fury of the Gods has taken several liberties in adapting from its source material. And one of the more well-known changes is that Shazam and his family were originally called Captain Marvel and the Marvel family for several years before a legal dispute with Marvel Comics forced DC to change the names of its characters. But only loyal fans of the franchise may know that the main villains who go by ‘Daughters of Atlas’, played by Lucy Liu, Rachel Ziegler, and Helen Mirren are original characters created just for the film and they have never featured in any issue of a Captain Marvel or Shazam comic book.
4. Despite the creative liberties taken by the makers in adapting this superhero story, a few hilarious scenes have been lifted verbatim from the comics. In the film, Billy Batson is shown to have a huge crush on Wonder Woman. There is even a scene where Billy dreams that he is on a date with the Amazonian Goddess in Paris. However, his dream is interrupted when the Wizard, played by Djimon Hounsou, tries to communicate with Billy through his dream. The Wizard swaps his face for Wonder Woman’s in the dream and turns into Billy’s worst nightmare. This scene is almost identical to the one shown in the comics.
5. Meagan Good and Faithe Herman essay the older and younger versions of Darla Dudley in the film. In a particular scene, Darla rescues a kitten, while she’s on a mission with her Shazam family to stop a bridge from collapsing, and she names the cat Tawny. In the comic books, Shazam has a talking tiger named Tawky Tawny, who also makes an appearance in the critically-acclaimed animated series Young Justice.
6. In the comics, the Wizard has a device called the Historama which he uses to look into the past, present, and future. The device was usually a TV screen or a book in the comics. In the film, a device similar to the Historama is used by the Shazam family and it is called Steve the Pen.

Well that's the OTTplay Now You Know for this episode , until the next time it's your host Nikhil signing out.

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• Written by Ryan Gomez