Last week, Dwayne Johnson posted a video on Twitter to celebrate Black Adam taking the top spot on the iTunes movie chart. He discussed the movie’s box office success and announced that the movie will continue to play in theaters throughout the holiday season. Johnson also shared new details about how hard he had to fight to convince Warner Bros. to bring back Henry Cavill to play Superman in the post-credits scene.
According to Johnson, Warner Bros. was ready to move on from Cavill:
At the end of the day, the studio was not bringing Henry Cavill back, inexplicably and inexcusably. […] This has been years in the making regarding bringing Henry Cavill back, and years of strategic conversations and we were not going to take no for an answer. For us, there’s no viable, logical way that you can attempt to build out the DC universe [with] the most powerful force and the greatest superhero of all time sitting on the sidelines. It’s impossible to do.
Johnson said that no matter how many different ways the studio tried to approach the future of the DC universe, he knew that fans were always going to ask the same question: “Where’s Superman?” He also said that recasting the role was never an option.
“Henry Cavill is our generation’s Superman,” Johnson said, “and in my opinion, the greatest Superman, and I mean that respectfully to the other actors — especially Christopher Reeve — the greatest Superman of all time.”
You can see Johnson talk about bringing Cavill back as Superman at around the 3:50 mark in the video below.
Not long after Black Adam hit theaters, James Gunn and Peter Safran took over as the co-CEOs and co-chairs of the new DC Studios. Days later, Netflix revealed that Cavill would not return as Geralt of Rivia for the fourth season of The Witcher. It seems clear that Gunn and Johnson are on the same page about Cavill’s role in the DCEU.
