DC Studios’ new co-CEOs, James Gunn and Father Safran, recently debuted the first projects in their rebooted shared movie universe, and some of the franchise’s key heroes won’t be returning. With so many changes on the way, Shazam’s future is currently unclear, despite the fact that the new movie sparks some exciting ideas for the future. Shazam! Anger of the Gods comes to the cinema tomorrow, so ComicBook. com‘s Brandon Davis attended a press event for the new DC movie, and director David F. Sandberg revealed that the recent changes to DC’s Shazam! follow-up.

“All of that happened after that. We were already… I mean, the movie was delivered at the end of October last year,” Sandberg explained. When asked how much the movie has changed since the original concept was made, Sandberg shared, “We kind of kind of started right after the first, started thinking about what the second would be. And in the beginning…Since the first follows The new 52 looking at comics pretty closely we first looked at what they had been doing in the comics since the first movie and we sort of started down that path but that story was very fantasy because they had all the doors in the room of doors and building different countries.”

He added: “There were some nice opportunities there. Like we could get Tawky Tawny, the talking tiger, in the movie from one of those animal lands and stuff, but for me it didn’t feel right because what I what I what I liked about the first movie is that it’s a pretty grounded world where something amazing happens, we still want to keep it in a somewhat grounded world.

Sandberg concluded, “And then we started talking about, well, his powers come from the Gods and things and mythological characters, so what if they come back to take his powers? And at first we kind of wanted Mr. Mind and Dr. Sivana, like it was Mr. Mind’s plan to bring the Gods here, as part of a bigger master plan, but it was just too much story. Even without that, it’s two hours and ten minutes of film, you know?”

Shazam! Anger of the Gods releases exclusively in theaters on March 17.