Lucy Liu joins Helen Mirren on the Shazam! sequel's team of villains

By Sam Barsanti | April 13, 2021 | 1:36am

Film Features Helen Mirren

Lucy Liu joins Helen Mirren on the Shazam! sequel's team of villains

Lucy Liu Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Hudson River Park

And here we thought Helen Mirren was powerful enough to destroy Shazam all on her own! Last month, we reported that Mirren had joined the cast of Shazam! Fury Of The Gods, the sequel to the 2019 Shazam! movie, as the villainous Hespera—who we had heard was “a daughter of Atlas.” Now, Warner Bros. has cast a second daughter of Atlas, with Variety saying that Lucy Liu signing on to play Kalypso. As far as anyone knows, these are characters created for the movie and not existing villains from Shazam’s comics, but Atlas is at least a figure in the superhero’s backstory (we got into this last time, but that’s where the second A in “Shazam” comes from).

We still don’t really know what this means for the Shazam! sequel, plot-wise, but it seems like it will be focusing more on the ancient origin of the Shazam powers. There’s nothing wrong with that as a concept, but it is still interesting that returning director David F. Sandberg is going with this “daughters of Atlas” thing rather than Mister Mind, the psychic worm villain who showed up at the end of the first movie. We would say that he’s maybe saving another big-name villain (you know, relatively) for the hypothetical third movie, but Shazam and Dwayne Johnson’s Black Adam have to fight at some point, right? People are going to want to see Zachary Levi punch a worm when they could see The Rock punch Zachary Levi. Either way, Shazam! Fury Of The Gods is coming in June of 2023, which seems very far away.