Is Zachary Levi a star?

The movie that seems to have the most advertising for the first Friday in April is Shazam!, which of course conjures thoughts of the Sinbad vehicle with a similar name from the 1990s, which is not actually a real movie, but some kind of group hallucination that makes me think we’re all really living in The Matrix.

I’m not interested in that fascinating angle on the movie, though. I’m more interested in its star.

Zachary Levi is the star of this movie, but he strikes me as a strange choice given that he’s not, you know, a star.

It’s not that he’s just starting out and hasn’t yet become a star. It’s that the time for Zachary Levi to potentially become a star has come and gone. What is he doing, then, as the poster boy (quite literally) for the most publicized movie coming out in the first week of April, 2019?

Levi has had his brush with fame, make no mistake. He was the star of a show that I didn’t watch but a lot of people seemed to like called Chuck. He’s also the voice of Flynn Rider in one of my favorite films of the past decade, Tangled, and all its various spinoffs. In fact, his involvement with Tangled alone was enough to make me reconsider whether to even write this post for fear of tarnishing anything related to that movie. He even plays a supporting character in two of the Thor movies, though this character was so unknown to me that I didn’t recognize him even when I looked him up.

None of these things, though, really make him a “star.”

Levi has been a busy working actor for the better part of two decades, but at age 38, he hasn’t really “made it,” which means that his presence in Shazam! is a bit unexpected. Or it could just be that in an era of total superhero saturation, you really need a good reason for each new one you make, and Zachary Levi is not a good enough reason.

But I don’t know, maybe he is a star, just not a movie star. He’s been in a number of TV series since Chuck ended in 2012, and I’ve heard of most of them.

Or it could be that Shazam! is a little movie that could, having risen in advertising prominence either by being unexpectedly good, or by an absence of competition on that release date. Director David F. Sandberg is an up-and-comer from his well-received horror movies Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation, but maybe he hasn’t come up enough yet to demand a really A-list cast. Though the cast for this is not bad, as it also includes Mark Strong, Meagan Good and Djimon Hounsou. Oh, and Adam Brody, who fills about the exact same “not quite star” status as Levi.

Either way, it’s probably not worth going on any longer about Zachary Levi’s insufficient star wattage.