‘Black Adam’ Takes “A Lot Of Edits” To Avoid R Rating From MPAA

Dwayne Johnson’s blockbuster continues to follow the trajectory of Marvel’s “Eternals” with an estimated total of $136 million after three weekends, a cume identical to Chloe Zhao’s November 2021 release. Without a Chinese release, which still hasn’t been announced by Warner Bros., “Black Adam” is likely to finish with a global total of around $400 million, roughly breaking even like Dwayne Johnson’s other DC release, “DC League of Super-Pets,” this past summer.

Let’s celebrate the heydays of this autumn’s box office where we can, the season greatly hampered by a lack of tentpole product.

That figure tops the $60 million opening that lead star Dwayne Johnson posted with the “Fast & Furious” spinoff “Hobbs & Shaw” in August 2019 and is consistent with the $67 million opening that Jason Momoa’s “Aquaman” earned in December 2018. It is also closer to the $70 million projections that independent trackers initially posted before lowering them to $60 million closer to release.

Dwayne Johnson’s epic “Black Adam” thunders into theaters this weekend. A film about 15 years in the making— Johnson recently shared a story on social media sharing a press hit about him playing the character in 2007—Johnson has just never given up on the anti-hero character.

Even though “Black Adam” hasn’t even officially hit theaters yet, there’s already lots of buzz about the film’s end-credits scene. So, a spoiler alert if it’s not apparent to the reader what that scene entails: Henry Cavill returns as Superman to stare down Dwayne Johnson‘s Black Adam.

The long-awaited DC Universe “Black Adam” superhero film premiered recently in New York, the embargo has been lifted, and everyone is free, per Warner Bros., to discuss the film in whatever terms they like. If you’re online, especially on Twitter tonight, you’re likely going to be hearing a lot about the film’s post-credit scene that will have been spoiled in a matter of minutes and will likely have fans, or at least the DC Universe disciples, in a big lather.

J. Kim Murphy The hierarchy of power in the DC Universe may be about to change with “Black Adam,” but the new film is landing low on the hierarchy of critical reputation for Warner Bros.’ last decade of superhero entries. With reviews hitting for the Dwayne Johnson vehicle this afternoon, “Black Adam” currently stands at a mediocre 30% approval rating from top critics on the the review-aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes. Should the number stand, it would mark the lowest such figure for a DC film since 2017’s “Justice League,” which netted a 23% approval rating from top critics and was so reviled among fans that a reworked version was eventually ordered by Warner Bros., arriving in the form of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” in 2021.

Finally, after a very long drought at the box office, a fire-breathing theatrical-windowed tentpole arrives in New Line’s Dwayne Johnson title, Black Adam.

Aldis Hodge is showing off his muscular arms at the premiere of his new movie, Black Adam, held at Cineworld Leicester Square on Tuesday night (October 18) in London, England.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic SPOILER ALERT: The following review contains mild spoilers for “Black Adam.” It’s kind of a cheat, casting someone as massive as Dwayne Johnson to play a DC superhero — or antihero, in the case of “Black Adam,” an action-packed, adolescent-skewing standalone that presents the swole Samoan star as a nearly invincible global threat. Black Adam is basically an A-bomb in human form, whose emergence from a 5,000-year lockdown calls for emergency intervention by the Justice Society of America, or “JSA,” which dispatches four glorified bench-warmers to contain the situation: Hawkman (Aldis Hodge, gruff), Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo, doofy), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell, colorful) and Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan, the standout, even if his character reads like a second-rate Doctor Strange).

Jesus Christ, am I ever tired of superhero movies. Maybe you’re not, in which case, you should close the tab and move on; anything that follows doesn’t matter because superhero movies are critic-proof, hence their limitless boosting (in funding, in marketing, in overall dominance) by a risk-averse industry.

It’s been a long wait — nearly a decade, in fact — since Dwayne Johnson first signed on to become an integral part of the DC universe. He’s recently turned 50 (not that he looks it). But now, at last, he’s launched a big-league entry in the cinematic superpowers world with Black Adam.

“Black Adam” this week, but when the superhero pic was first submitted to the MPA, it earned an R rating.“We were battling with the [MPA] for a while, we were an R rating for several weeks, and it took a lot of work to get us under, to like make enough little tweaks to be able to get to that PG-13 bar,” producer Hiram Garcia told TheWrap in a recent interview.Johnson’s Black Adam is an anti-hero-like character who doles out his own sense of justice, killing at will, which stands in contrast to a number of other major superheroes that normally front their own movies.But Garcia, who is also president of production at Seven Bucks Productions, explained that the filmmaking team had already decided to push the boundaries of the PG-13 rating during production and then pull back as necessary in the editing room.“We always knew that we were going to be in that situation because we knew we were going to push it, and then we knew we’re gonna have to really work to get ourselves [to a PG-13], but we wanted to maximize that PG-13 rating, just to make sure we were honoring the character.”So what put “Black Adam” over the edge?“The movie was just really violent,” Garcia explained. “The movie was just violent.

Zack Sharf “Black Adam” is rated PG-13 for “sequences of strong violence, intense action and some language,” but it turns out the first several cuts of the film were even more violent. Producers Beau Flynn and Hiram Garcia confirmed to Collider that “Black Adam” originally earned an R rating and it took “four rounds” of cuts for the MPA to agree to lower the rating to the team’s desired PG-13. The crew always knew it wanted “Black Adam” to push the limits of PG-13 violence considering the title character’s comic book roots. “We really wanted to make sure that we honored the character of Black Adam,” Garcia said. “One of the things he’s known for is his aggression and violence, and to do a Black Adam movie that didn’t have that just wouldn’t have been authentic. So we always went into this knowing that we were going to push it as far as we did.”