‘Shazam! Fury of the Gods’ Gets Pushed Back Five Days To Avoid ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’

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Movie studios are always trying to avoid the competition at the box office, especially when it comes to the blockbuster franchises, and with Avatar: The Way of Water on its way, who would be crazy enough to release a movie on the same day as the long-awaited sequel of James Cameron’s sci-fi spectacle which is still the highest-grossing movie of all time?

Well, Warner Bros. is, or at least they were. Back when Avatar 2 was still set to be released in 2021, WB has set the release date for Aquaman 2 on December 16, 2022. But, Disney later delayed Avatar’s sequel to the exact same date. Last year, WB made some changes on the release calendar and they pushed Aquaman 2 to March 2023, but they moved Shazam! Fury of the Gods ahead to December 16, 2022.

Considering that Avatar: The Way of Water is a sequel that the entire world of movies was waiting for for the last 13 years, WB didn’t want to risk it and they pushed Shazam back to December 21, 2022. It’s only five days of difference, but those five days could mean a lot.

The original Avatar movie was released in 2009 and it grossed more than $2.7 billion worldwide, which makes it the highest-grossing movie of all time. Avengers Endgame managed to overthrow it from the top spot in July 2019, but Avatar returned to the top spot after another re-release in China in the summer of 2020. Speaking of re-releases, Avatar will be re-released again next September so that people can experience it again on the big screen before the sequel arrives.

Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a sequel to the original DC movie Shazam which was released in March 2019. The first movie grossed $366 million worldwide, which seems low for a superhero movie, but it was enough to greenlight a sequel. The movie received positive reviews so the sequel is widely anticipated, but it’s known that Avatar is too much of a competition to handle.

Avatar: The Way of Water is set to be released on December 16, 2022, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods on December 21, 2021. We’re going to spend a lot of time in a theater the next holiday season.

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Lukas Abramovich is a freelance writer and photo and video editor based in Croatia. He's also a web designer and holds a Master’s degree in general Computer Science from the Faculty of Informatics based in Pula, Croatia. Since 2018, Lukas has worked on several portals writing about movies, TV shows, and video games. He's currently writing articles for two of them: Fiction Horizon and Comic Basics. He also has a YouTube channel in his native language, and the content there is mostly reviewing popular movies and TV shows. Lukas also has an Instagram page where he once used to post fan-made posters he made, which is something he would like to continue working on, as photo and video editing are also some of his passions. Lukas is a big movie lover who is okay with watching any kind of movie. His favorite movie is Michael Curtiz's Casablanca, but he's a loyal follower of Marvel and DC movies, as well as several other blockbuster franchises he's been following for years; Star Wars, Fast & Furious, Mission: Impossible, and James Cameron's Avatar are only some of them. His favorite director is Christopher Nolan, with Quentin Tarantino and Denis Villeneuve as honorable mentions. Lukas is also a big fan of four fantasy multimedia franchises; The Wizarding World, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Witcher, and The Lord of the Rings. He calls them "the four rulers of the fantasy genre." He loves to write about anything spawned from those franchises (books, games, movies...), as well as anything branded with the Marvel or DC logo. Video games and their adaptations are also something he follows faithfully since he's a big fan of story-driven single-player games like Assassin's Creed, The Last of Us, Uncharted, etc. His favorite video game ever is Red Dead Redemption 2.