What we know for sure: Warner Bros. has at least 10 movies in various stages of development based on DC Comics heroes and villains. One of them is Shazam, which has no heroic lead yet but will star Dwayne Johnson as bad guy Black Adam. Unlike the other nine, Shazam is in development at Warner Bros. subsidiary New Line Cinema.
It had been strongly implied by New Line's president, Toby Emmerich, that Shazam would be set in its own universe — apart from the rest of DC's big-screen storytelling. It sucked that there would be no Shazam or Black Adam in the Justice League movies, but it seemed like a done deal.
Then, just before Christmas, DC Comics posted on its blog a retrospective on 2014 mentioning that "Warner Bros. revealed a full slate of ten DC Entertainment feature films all set within the same universe." (Emphasis added.) DC Comics fans rejoiced; it seemed that there was finally a definitive answer stating that Shazam would take place in the same universe as the other DC films.
But then there was a peculiar twist.
Five days after it was published, the aforementioned blog post over at dccomics.com was changed. It was edited, with the words "all set within the same universe" cut out. The original version can still be seen via the Internet Archive, while the edited version is what's on DC's site now.
What does it mean? Clearly, someone at DC Comics spoke out of turn about the setting of the Shazam movie, and then later, either thought better of making a broad generalization or were given a mandate from the Powers That Be that it wasn't factually correct.
So our "definitive" answer is no longer a sure thing at all. We'll likely never know exactly why it was posted one way and then changed, but these cleared-up waters are suddenly all kinds of muddy again.
Thanks for nothing, DC.
