Though most of Black Adam’s stories revolve around his ongoing battle against Billy Batson and the rest of the Shazam crew, according to Dwayne Johnson, the character’s upcoming feature film will actually introduce another rather significant element of DC’s comics lore to its cinematic universe.
In a recent interview with Screenrant, Johnson explained that because Black Adam is set to be an origin film of sorts, audience members shouldn’t expect to see him facing off against Shazam just yet, but he added we will get to meet the Justice Society of America. Unsurprisingly, Johnson didn’t go into detail about how the JSA will factor into the movie—all he said was, “JSA. We will introduce you to that, the world to JSA”—but there are a number of different directions Black Adam could end up going because of the narrative complexities that define the super team.
Originally, the JSA was a group of Golden Age heroes from All-Star Comics including Alan Scott as the Green Lantern and Jay Garrick as the Flash. While All-Star comics ended in the early ‘50s, DC would eventually incorporate the JSA into its larger multiverse comics continuity in Crisis on Infinite Earths, the event that reimagined the team as the precursor to the Justice League, explaining how and why there were so many similarities between the two groups.
Because the JSA’s traditionally been depicted as being from another era, there’s a chance that Black Adam could very well be set in the past and the titular villain ends up having to do battle with them. It’d be an interesting way to further explore the DCEU’s history in the same way that the first Wonder Woman film did, and it would give Black Adam the kind of gravitas befitting a true supervillain when the film hits theatres in 2021.