In the internet age, how many times have we seen practically as much as we can of a new superhero movie’s snazzy suits and costumes before we get even a glimpse of an official look from a poster or a trailer? It happens all the time. Hell, it happened today. But Shazam: Fury of the Gods director David F. Sandberg has a simple solution — grab your actors off set and take some pics yourself.
Sandberg did so to reveal the updated suit designs for the Marvels as they’ll appear in Shazam follow up Fury of the Gods, including Zachary Levi as Shazam, alongside Adam Brody, Meagan Good, Ross Butler, D. J. Cotrona, and Grace Fulton as the superheroic adult versions of Billy Batson’s friends and family. (Fulton now plays both her superheroic self and Billy’s foster sister Mary, replacing Michelle Borth, who played her superhero form in the first movie.)
Don’t know how long we can keep the new suits from leaking so here’s a pic I took the other day pic.twitter.com/41wStJ6oe2
— David F. Sandberg (@ponysmasher) June 21, 2021
The suits themselves are interesting, if relatively minor upgrades from what we saw in the first film — the aesthetic is mostly similar, with the largest changes being tweaks to the lightning bolt logo (removing the lit-up part), new gauntlets and boot designs, and the replacement of a lighter coloured fabric for darker, textured material in the suit bodies, bringing the film’s aesthetic more in line with other DC superhero movies.
Other than that, they’re not really all that new — but it’s still nice to see, especially as Sandberg was primarily sharing the picture just so fans could see the suits in a well-lit environment before grainy set snaps from location shooting could leak. An experience the director is very familiar with, as the first Shazam went through months and months of costume leaks from set pictures and other sources — and mockery — before we ever officially saw Levi’s ‘final’ supersuit. It’s an experience that’s not specific to Shazam either; outside of a few rare surprises, practically every first look we get at a major superhero movie’s costume designs comes from glimpses and glances from set pictures, well before official material emerges.
That can be frustrating to the people who are making these things, not just because they’re leaks but because they can lead to people dismissing design choices or certain aesthetic tweaks when they’re not seeing the suits as close to how they’ll eventually appear on screen — properly lit, maybe with post-production or CG enhancements, or what have you. Sandberg’s willingness to try and get ahead of that and just grab his actors on the production backlot is a refreshing bit of candor that should be more than an exception in these big superhero movies, honestly.