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via Warner Bros.
Having long since cultivated a career as one of the most unfortunate and unlucky stars following a string of what ifs and near misses, Shazam! Fury of the Gods has lent more weight to the conspiracy theory that Henry Cavill was actually a curse on the DCU whenever he was being lined up to appear.
Obviously, the deposed Superman has plenty of fans as a cursory glance at social media on any given day will attest, but it would be selling the facts very short to say that his tenure as the franchise’s canonical Kryptonian was a runaway success story. In fact, almost the complete opposite has proven to be true.
The actor headlined the very first installment in the shared superhero universe, but Man of Steel never came close to getting a sequel. He followed that up by ceding top billing to Ben Affleck in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, with his shunt down the pecking order coming in a box office under-performer that remains one of the most polarizing comic book adaptations of the last decade.
Joss Whedon’s Justice League and whatever the hell was going on with his top lip speaks for itself, while he was one of the few cast members who didn’t shoot new scenes for the Snyder Cut, which served to hammer the final nail into the coffin of the SnyderVerse instead of resurrecting it from the cinematic scrapheap.
He missed out on the chance to make a cameo in one of the DCU’s best-reviewed entries when his planned Shazam! appearance fell through, before his long-awaited return in Black Adam led absolutely nowhere once it was decided neither Cavill’s Clark Kent nor Dwayne Johnson’s Teth-Adam were required.
While Superman doesn’t factor into Shazam! Fury of the Gods, director David F. Sandberg did reveal that the Big Blue Boy Scout was written into earlier drafts of the script. The former Geralt of Rivia may have dodged a bullet this time, but with Zachary Levi’s solo sequel on course to crater at the box office, it’s a little too late to draw the line under the Curse of Henry Cavill.