‘Shazam!’ director backed off making movies based on existing material, citing death threats

The dark side of adapting existing material that already has legions of fans includes death threats, filmmaker David F. Sandberg recently revealed.

Fan reactions to the director’s DC Universe films, 2019’s Shazam! and its 2023 sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods, pushed him to a point where he thought, “I never wanna do another IP-based movie because it’s just not worth it,” Sandberg told GamesRadar about material adapted from existing intellectual property (IP).

“Fans can get very, very crazy and very angry with you. You can get, like, death threats and everything,” he said.

Sandberg established himself as a craftsman of genre thrills with his 2016 feature directorial debut, the claustrophobic horror film Lights Out, and added outrageous action set pieces to his repertoire with the Conjuring universe’s Annabelle: Creation the year after.

Though Shazam! massively expanded the scale of production Sandberg was accustomed to working with, he still struck gold when the first film was released to box office success and critical approval.

Fury of the Gods, however, was a different story.

Though Sandberg, star Zachary Levi, and the rest of the Fury of the Gods were met with disappointing box office and more negative reviews the second time around, what stung the most was the fan reaction. Levi chalked up the film’s struggle to gain a foothold to “online hate and haters and trolls and factions and all of that” that has “gotten more galvanized in its toxicity, and I think that there are people that genuinely, unfortunately, want to destroy certain projects because they don’t like them or they don’t like me or other people involved in them.”

Sandberg took to social media after the film’s premiere to note in a now-deleted post, “As I’ve been saying for a while now, I’m very eager to go back to horror (as well as trying some new things)… After six years of Shazam, I’m definitely done with superheroes for now.”

Return to horror he did, with Until Dawn, a bloody, road-trip thriller that debuted at No. 5 at this weekend’s box office. But while Until Dawn isn’t based on source material as widely known or loved as a character from DC Comics, it’s still an “IP-based movie.”

“What I loved about the script [is] that it wasn’t trying to recreate the game,” Sandberg said, referencing the 2015 survival horror video game by Will Byles and Nik Bowen. Sandberg reasons that the team behind his big-screen adaptation “would’ve gotten a lot of critique if we had tried to [recreate the game], because people would’ve been like, ‘It’s not as good. It’s not the same actors.'”

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The Swedish filmmaker thinks his film works because it’s “a new thing,” but still maintains that “it’s very much in the spirit of the game.”

Sandberg is currently still attached to direct another IP-based horror film, The Unsound, based on the 2017 graphic novel by Cullen Bunn.