Zachary Levi Goes Triple Cringe in His Defense of 'The Truth' After 'Shazam 2' Flops

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | March 24, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Celebrity | March 24, 2023 |

It is one thing to star in a movie that bombs. Actors can come back from that. Margot Robbie’s career, for instance, will not be affected by the failure of Babylon. No one is going to hold the failure of She Said against Carey Mulligan, and most people have forgotten that Ambulance even existed, so how can they hold it against Jake Gyllenhaal or Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

But when you are the face of a superhero franchise that bombs? That can be a career killer. If you’re Dwayne Johnson, it will hurt your pride, but you have other movies to fall back on. But if you don’t? Who remembers that Gabriel Macht was the lead in the superhero film The Spirit with Sam Jackson and Scarlett Johansson? Scarjo and Sam made it out unscathed, but Macht was sentenced to nine seasons of Suits. That’s harsh.

Likewise, after the Shazam 2 bomb, Zachary Levi — who has nothing to fall back on besides the dim hope of a Chuck movie or a sequel to the Kurt Warner biopic covering Warner’s years in the announcer booth — is on the fast track to a career in faith-based films, at best, and he is not handling it well.

To wit: After the finger-pointing started, Levi jumped on the opportunity to … blame anyone else besides himself. He blamed marketing. He blamed Zack Snyder fans, who he says wanted Shazam 2 to fail.

Levi has also been blaming Dwayne Johnson, who went on his own blame-game tour after the failure of Black Adam. Levi’s reasoning is more specious. He suggests that Dwayne Johnson’s failure to film a post-credits scene for Shazam 2 had a hand in its failure, as did Johnson’s effort to pit his character against Henry Cavill’s Superman instead of more directly connecting his character to the Shazam universe.

In fact, Levi hasn’t been able to let that particular complaint go. He returned to that well this morning, and folks: The Cringe. It is hard to watch.

no actor has ever been more unemployed pic.twitter.com/tmwh78jMOH

— alex (@alex_abads) March 24, 2023

It’s not about the box office, friends. It’s about THE TRUTH. Zachary Levi is out there DEFENDING THE TRUTH. I don’t know if this is more embarrassing, or the way he begged to get cast on The Last of Us earlier this week before deleting his post out of embarrassment because he got no response.

Zachary: Let your career crumple into a fetal ball with dignity, man.