This is going to make me sound crazy but...

Over on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, its critic score sits at a stunning 91 percent, and its audience score is similarly high, at 89 percent. The critic score is a close second behind Wonder Woman's 93%, while the audience score is the best in the whole DCEU by just a hair

Sandberg has made a truly unique superhero blockbuster, effortlessly blending light humor and dark horror. The result is something that's powerful but somehow charming, like a fairy tale of old, that contains a lot of darkness if you look closely but leaves you filled with warmth and joy. Although this should have been the most Marvel-like films of all the DCEU, Shazam stands out from the crowd as something very different.

Fundamentally, Shazam is a story about finding your family. Billy has spent years desperately looking for his mom, running away from every foster home he's been placed in. Even when he's put in the Vasquez family, he still won't open his heart to them and runs away again the moment he learns where his mom is. The encounter between Billy and his mom is the defining moment in his character arc, as for the first time Billy sees his mom as who she truly is; a disappointment. This prepares Billy for the third act, when he takes stock and realizes that he has actually found his family after all, that he loves his siblings and that they love him. He opens his heart to them, and in so doing shares his power. Suddenly Shazam is no lone champion; he's part of a family of heroes. And there's no way Doctor Sivana and the Seven Deadly Sins can stand against that.

The third act has all the CGI action you'd traditionally expect from a superhero blockbuster, but in the case of Shazam it all flows from the themes and character arcs. Indeed, the contrast between the Shazam Family and the Seven Deadly Sins is what allows Billy and his family to triumph. The Seven Sins care nothing for one another, and indeed compete with one another rather than working as a team. The Shazam Family use this to draw them out, and ultimately Billy tricks Envy into abandoning Sivana, bringing the fight to a satisfying conclusion. No other DCEU film has had this kind of narrative and thematic consistency right the way through the third act, and few Marvel movies have achieved this either.

while the connectivity is there, it never takes over. In an interview with Deadline, Sandberg was asked how Shazam fits into the DCEU, and his answer was instructive. "I don’t know, really," he observed. "That’s what was so liberating with making this movie. It was that we only have to do the best Shazam! movie we can do... It felt like we were making our own movie — it just takes place in the DC universe."

They're allowing each director to make their own unique and distinctive superhero film, just one that happens to be set in the DC universe. There's no sense of an overarching narrative tying these movies together, no story beat that simply has to happen in order to ensure everything is cohesive. Instead, there's just an opportunity for each director to play in the DCEU sandbox.

The shared universe model carries risks as well as benefits. The ties that bind the films together can prove restrictive, preventing individual superhero movies from living up to their potential. Ironically, that never needed to be the case; over in the comics, DC has long been proving that continuity and connectedness comes second to storytelling, while each superhero is given a creative team appropriate to their high-level concept. Warner Bros. has now learned to do the same with the movies too, and in the case of Shazam it's paid dividends. It also suggests the future of the DCEU is very bright indeed.