A ton of cool announcement came out of San Diego Comic-Con, but one of the more interesting ones was that
Shazam will be helmed by David Sandberg. Sandberg has made his claim to fame in the horror genre with 2016's Lights Out and the new Conjuring spin-off, Annabelle: Creation, so Shazam will be a major departure.
While horror seems the be his bread and butter, Sandberg recently spoke to switching things up with
Shazam. Speaking to
MovieFone, the director revealed how
Shazam will be different in terms of tone.
"This will be very different than what I've done in the feature space, because it's not a horror movie and it's a much lighter tone," Sandberg explained.
"But it's something that I look forward to trying out, even though I plan to return to horror in some fashion. My background, back in Sweden, before I started doing horror shorts, I was doing animated comedy shorts. It's not totally alien to me to have more of a comedy approach. I look forward to taking that on in a feature."
He then went on to talk about diving into the history of Billy Batson, A.K.A. Shazam, as well as just now getting to know the character.
"It wasn't a character I grew up with. It was published in Sweden, where I'm from, in the '70s, so it's a little before my time. So I only knew him from the Justice League," he said.
"It's not until now that I'm getting into the comics and reading a lot of the old ones, the Geoff Johns ones, 'The Power of Shazam,' and looking at a bunch of animation. So I'm really getting to know the character."
Another aspect that Sandberg spoke about was confirming that the
Shazam film will be developed by New Line Cinema, a Warner Brothers' company, but not the parent company directly. Sandberg said of New Line,
"They've been awesome. I will keep making movies with them as long as they want me."
As of right now,
Shazam is looking to shoot in February of 2018, and eyeing a mid-2019 release date.