‘Shazam! Fury of The Gods’ Director David Sandberg Explains Why Sivana And Mister Mind Aren’t In the Film: “It Was Too Much Story To Tell”
JB Augustine
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The first Shazam film set up further encounters with the hero’s biggest rivals behind Black Adam, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana and the wormy Mister Mind. However, they won’t be seen and instead, the Daughters of Atlas bring the world to the brink of destruction with, well, the Fury of the Gods. Come to find out, that wasn’t always the case.
Sivana (Mark Strong) meets Mr. Mind in his cell, Shazam! (2019)
Shazam’s director David Sandberg explained a week before the sequel’s release that he was trying to fit Sivana and Mr. Mind, particularly into the latter’s story but they made it too cramped when he preferred to keep the plot simple. He told Gizmodo they “looked at the comics” and a few treatments before ultimately settling on a villain.
“First of all, we looked at the comic books, what they were doing, but that didn’t feel like a good fit for what this movie needed to be. Then, of course, since we did set up Mister Mind at the end of the first one, we did start looking at treatments and things where it did involve Mister Mind and Sivana,” Sandberg said.
Zachary Levi as Shazam opposite Helen Mirren in Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)
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“[At one point] it was actually Mister Mind who enabled the sisters to come here because it was part of a bigger plan of his. But it was just too much story to tell for this movie. So we had to lose Mister Mind and Sivana for this time. So they were in there originally, but not as the main villain,” he continued.
Without them, it was a “back and forth” when deciding on an antagonist. “There was a lot of back and forth on what to do, because we wanted to have something in the real world but bring something cool here. And then the idea was that [Shazam’s] powers are from Greek gods and mythology and all of that,” Sandberg elaborated.
Zachary Levi as Shazam in Shazam! (2019), Warner Bros. Pictures
“So it’s like, ‘Ooh, if the powers were stolen and then given to him, that gives a motivation that you can understand with the sisters.’ I mean, they do have a point here. They go about it in a bad way, but they do have a point,” he’d continue, adding the mix of Greek mythology and modern mythology (superheroes) made sense.
Sandberg would then explain that the Wizard’s staff breaking in the first film gave him a “linchpin” to bypass Mister Mind and his agenda. This incident becomes the reason, he reveals, for the arrival of Atlas’s Daughters – or Hesperidae – into Billy Batson’s world. The rather reckless decision by Billy that endangers all existence was reshot for Fury of the Gods to fit the new costumes.
Lucy Liu as a daughter of Atlas in Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)
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