The new trailer for Shazam! Fury of the Gods reveals the DC movie sequel's new villains, played by Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu. The "Daughters of Atlas" look to steal the power of Billy Batson and his friends, which they feel is theirs by right, and give the new movie a threat worthy of one of DC's most powerful superheroes. In the process, the trailer may have tipped the movie's hand about how they might go about it and revealed a potentially huge weakness of the hero in the bargain.
Billy's family looks to play a big role in the new film, which formed part of the original Shazam's core message. In becoming a superhero, he learns that he's stronger with his buddies around him, which completes his origin story at the end of the film. For Shazam 2, the Daughters of Atlas look to turn that very strength into a fatal vulnerability.
Shazam 2's Trailer Reveals a Vulnerable Shazam Family
The Shazam 2 trailer focuses largely on the Daughters' arrival on Earth, where they soon target Billy's coterie as an impediment to their plans. More specifically, they appear to strip Freddy Freeman of his powers -- transforming him back into a normal boy -- and repeat the process with the other team members. They leave Billy isolated behind an energy shield of some kind while they depart with Freddy as a hostage.
Sharp-eyed viewers will spot the staff of the wizard Shazam, which first gave Billy his powers and later enabled him to share them with his friends. Billy broke the staff at the end of the first Shazam! to keep evildoers from using it. The Daughters appear to have re-created it and are using it to strip the others of their powers as readily as they were given. It suggests that the two know exactly what they're doing, but it also lends further weight to their abduction of Freddy.
Shazam's Connection to His Friends May Prove an Achilles' Heel
Shazam! has always tapped into the children's fantasy of growing up, with the added benefit of superpowers to sweeten the deal. But it also stresses their vulnerability in the process, along with the old chestnut of maintaining a secret identity. Billy and his friends are still kids, after all, and returning them to that state is usually the most effective way for a villain to get the upper hand. The Daughters appear to push that advantage ruthlessly in the trailer, turning the kids into hostages that Billy will do anything to save. That would also explain shots of him asking to have his power removed: presumably trading it to the Daughters in exchange for his friend's safety.
In the process, it constitutes a neat reversal from Billy's journey in the first Shazam! The others initially gained their powers when he decided to share them, giving them strength in numbers to defeat The Seven Deadly Sins and their controller Sivana. That emphasizes a "stronger together" theme that ties into a lesson about looking out for people other than oneself. The Daughters appear to have picked up on that, first by depowering the others -- leaving Billy alone -- and then leveraging his emotional connections to them to induce his surrender.
As with Superman, the seemingly limitless powers of Shazam create a challenge when finding a suitable villain, which can result in nerfing him or, worse, simply not using his full powers to provide sufficient suspense in a given story. Shazam 2 is apparently aware of the problem and responds not only by keeping the previously established lexicon in place but by emphasizing his personal vulnerabilities instead of his superpowered ones. With the DC movie universe in flux, and the first Shazam! movie standing out as an all-too-infrequent highlight, that decision may prove to be a wise one, giving the sequel a neat reversal of the original to develop.
Shazam! Fury of the Gods opens on March 17 in theaters everywhere.