WARNING: The following contains spoilers for director Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman 1984, streaming on HBO Max and playing in select theaters.
Although much of Wonder Woman 1984 is set in Washington, D.C., the Warner Bros. sequel takes a detour to Egypt for not only one of its best action set pieces -- the desert convoy sequence showcased in trailers -- but also for a nod to a classic DC comics location with ties to the villain-turned-antihero Black Adam: Bialya.
In director Patty Jenkins' film, conman/aspiring corporate mogul Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) sets his sights on the Dreamstone, a fabled object that grants the wish of anyone who touches it -- at a steep price. (Yes, even the characters come to recognize it's "The Monkey's Paw.") A charlatan whose financial success is little more than a house of cards, Max wishes to become the living embodiment of the Dreamstone, with an eye toward building his empire, one desire at a time: He'll grant the wishes of those he encounters -- from a job applicant to the U.S. president -- and take what he wants from each of them in return.
That certainly foolproof plan takes him to Cairo, Egypt, to visit Emir Said Bin Abydos (Amr Waked), an oil tycoon whose fortunes are the object of Max's envy. Dismissive of Max's meteoric rise through the business world, the emir nevertheless reveals his wish for the return of his ancestral realm, the lands of the Bialyian Dynasty. No political or historical context is given, but the wish immediately causes turmoil with the eruption from the ground of a stone wall that encircles Said Bin Abydos' land, and cuts off some of the city's poorest residents from their only source of water.
In DC comics, Bialya isn't a dynasty but instead a country in the Middle East, somewhere north of Saudi Arabia. Introduced in 1987's Justice League #2, Bialya is a military-controlled nation perhaps best known as the place where archaeologist Dan Garrett unearthed the Blue Beetle Scarab and, more recently, where an enraged Black Adam murdered thousands of its inhabitants. Yes, you read that correctly.
In the 2006 weekly comic 52, the Four Horsemen of Apokolips -- the living embodiments of famine, war, pestilence and death -- used Bialya as a base from which to launch a devastating attack on the nearby nation of Khandaq, which was under the protection of Black Adam, his wife Isis and brother-in-law Osiris. The latter two were killed in the process, leaving Black Adam to avenge their deaths with a brutal assault on Bialya as he searched for the sole surviving Horseman, Death.
Long in development, a Black Adam film starring Dwayne Johnson is finally on the horizon for Warner Bros., as both a spinoff of, and sequel to, Shazam! (the 2019 movie even gives a nod to the character). It seems doubtful the project will send the longtime Shazam foe into fictional Bialya, or even pick up on Wonder Woman 1984's Bialyian Dynasty thread, but it's there should the need arise.
Directed by Patty Jenkins, from a script she wrote with Geoff Johns and David Callaham, Wonder Woman 1984 stars Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal and Natasha Rothwell. The film is playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.