Actor Zachary Levi put Hollywood on blast in Chicago last weekend telling comic book fans to stop going to the “garbage” movies that La La Land puts out.
Comic actor Zachery Levi spoke to fans at Chicago’s Fan Expo on Saturday and took Hollywood to task for not caring if good movies are made and urged fans to “actively not choose” to pay good money to see them.
“I personally feel like the amount of content that comes out of Hollywood that is garbage — they don’t care enough to actually make it great for you guys. They don’t,” Levi told the crowd according to Entertainment Weekly.
“How many times do you watch a trailer and go, ‘Oh my God, this looks so cool!’ Then you go to the movie and it’s like, ‘This was what I get?’” Levi complained.
“They know that once you’ve already bought the ticket and you’re in the seat, they’ve got your money. And the only way for us to change any of it is to not go to the garbage. We have to actively not choose the garbage. It’ll help. It’ll help a lot,” he said.
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Levi’s days as part of the DC Comics universe (DCEU) of films may already be numbered. A third installment of his “Shazam” films seems unlikely since the DCEU has made a major course correction, thrown out all its past films, and is intending to start fresh to try and tie them all together like Marvel did with most of its films.
Of course, the first installment of Levi’s “Shazam” film was a surprise hit and did well financially.
The second, and very woke, “Shazam” film, “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” though, was torched by critics. So some of Levi’s comments may be his sour grapes. But, he went on to point out that moviegoers liked the film despite the vociferous naysaying of the critics.
“The audience score is still quite good, but the critics’ score was, I don’t know, very oddly and perplexingly low, and people were insanely unkind,” Levi said of the film in July.
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“Listen, I’ve been a part of things and as much as I wish that they were good, I know that they’re okay, I know they missed a lot. I’m not saying “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” is some perfect Orson Welles masterpiece, but it’s a good darn movie,” he exclaimed.
Levi is right about the ratings. Fans have given it a relatively upbeat 86 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, even as critics have rated it a dismal 49 percent.
Still, the film also only took in $57.64 million at the box office in the U.S. which wasn’t stupendous. On the other hand, it topped out at $133.84 million worldwide. However, it probably just missed breaking even from its $125 million budget, and because of that, it was considered a box-office flop.
The point is, even as fans liked the film, it appears that there were fewer fans interested in seeing it in the first place since its box office total was so disappointing.
In any case, after news outlets began reporting on Levi’s comments, he ended up trying to walk it back and claimed he was “taken out of context.”
“It’s come to my attention that an offhand remark I made in jest last weekend is being taken out of context,” Levi said, according to Breitbart News.
“So let me be very clear. I fully support my union, the WGA, and the strike … But we also cannot forget our fans during this strike. Fans that spend their money and energy traveling far distances to talk with us about our work that means so much to them, we should be able to engage,” he tried to explain.
It is hard to see how anything was “taken out of context,” but there you go.
Whatever he “meant,” Levi is basically right. Hollywood keeps putting out “garbage” that fewer and fewer people are going to see. Ticket sales and attendance has been falling for years, even as the “blockbuster” films do well. In fact, if it weren’t for Marvel’s films, Hollywood would have seen much steeper declines over the past decade or so. According to IndieWire, theater audiences fell by half over the last four years alone (granted, some of that was during the pandemic hysteria).
And with the writers strike still dragging on, there won’t be a whole lot new coming out next year. That’ll have an impact, too.
One wonders if Levi’s comments will embolden other actors and moviemakers to speak out. But whether they do or not, fans are already voting with their feet and are turning away from Hollywood in droves.
