Zachary Levi Says Both Captain Marvel Movies Can Get Along
Here’s a fun little piece of comic book trivia for you: Captain Marvel is a character created by Fawcett Comics that was bought by DC Comics after Fawcett went out of business. While the character was out of print, Marvel Comics swooped in and picked up a trademark on the name Captain Marvel, slapped it on a fairly uninspired clone of the Fawcett character and eventually created the Graphic Novel to keep the book they killed the character off in constantly in print so they could keep the trademark. This is also how and why The New Mutants and She-Hulk were created, among a few other characters, just to make sure DC or another publisher didn’t create a character with a similar name as a Marvel character. It kind of sounds like Marvel is the bad guy here but DC started printing graphic novels around the same time to hold on to the rights for The Watchmen, which revert to Alan Moore a year after it goes out of print (which he expected to mean sometime in 1988 when he signed the contract), so they’re not exactly the good guys.
DC has been marketing their Captain Marvel, the original Captain Marvel, under the brand Shazam! since way back in the 70’s when they launched The Shazam/Isis Power Hour, and that marketing has continues into the Shazam! movie starring Zachary Levi which releases shortly after Marvel’s Captain Marvel movie starring Brie Larson as someone who presumably figures out she’s a Nazi by the end of the film. This has created some tension between the two camps of fans, because, you know, they’re comic book fans, fighting with each other on the internet is their whole thing.
Zachary Levi wants everyone to get along, and gave a lecture on it as if he was the internet’s dad. This is kind of fitting considering the original Captain Marvel was sort of designed to look like if your dad was a superhero.
Dear @ZacharyLevi, thank you for this. This is how you use your platform people. Nothing but respect for my #Shazam.
— It Was All a Dream, I Used to Read Wizard Magazine (@UpToTASK) February 24, 2019
What he’s talking about in that video, where he says there’s no rivalry between his Captain Marvel (now Shazam) and Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, is reports that people had been posting negative reviews of Captain Marvel on places like Rotten Tomatoes even though almost no one has seen the movie yet, which would be really dumb. If you don’t like a movie, don’t like the movie, but don’t say you don’t like it until after you see it. You can say it looks so bad you don’t want to see it, but that’s not a review of a movie.
What actually happened is that people had driven down Rotten Tomatoes “anticipation score” until the site removed it, according to Comicbook.com. Which is kind of fair game, but why is that even a thing? Everyone knows all the mundanes are going to see the new Marvel Movie because everyone has cabin fever and after this winter it’ll just be nice to leave the house and see a color that isn’t grey. The fact that nerds had a slapfight on social media about a movie isn’t going to change a single person’s mind about seeing a movie.
