Back in the 00s, the idea of making an Aquaman movie was deemed so ridiculous that the Hollywood bro comedy Entourage spent much of its second and third seasons taking the mickey out of the idea. In the end, Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) only agrees to star in the superhero epic because box office king James Cameron signs on to direct it.
This, of course, was long before the advent of the Marvel and DC superhero universes, which have since gone on to dominate multiplexes and prove that people really will turn out in their droves to see (for the most part) preposterously entertaining films about spandex-sporting titans as conceptually silly as Shazam!, Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon. During the peak of the comic book movie era, which on recent evidence appears to be long gone, it seemed as if almost any character from the pages of DC and Marvel could be spun off into their own big screen adventure. If Vin Diesel can be convinced to play a talking tree whose only utterance is “I Am Groot”, you know the creatives behind this are fully aware they are riding a gravy train to the land of psychedelic potentiality.
Perhaps that’s why James Wan’s Aquaman remains the highest-grossing film in what used to be known as the DC extended universe (DCEU), with $1.14bn in global box office receipts, despite being cheesier than a wheel of brie and chock full of the kind of lazy writing most fans thought they had got rid of in the 1980s. Back in 2018, critics seemed terrified of laying into deeply average superhero movies (though not the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw) in case they wound up with egg on their faces as yet another one zoomed off into the box office stratosphere.
Now the party’s over. With Marvel movies such as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Eternals failing to wow, well … anyone, and DC’s output falling off a financial cliff, the word is clearly out that anything less than a five-star superhero flick is ripe for a trouncing. Just look at the way Andy Muschietti’s The Flash, a perfectly serviceable multiversal comic book movie, was dumped on as if it were a Batman and Robin for this era.
Perhaps this is why Wan’s forthcoming sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is shooting so much bad, watery hype out of its blowhole. According to industry reports this week, the expensive, £200m-budget film is now on its third set of reshoots – almost unheard of for such a high profile movie – and has dumped two versions of Batman along the way. As the cogs of change have whirred and clanked through different regimes at parent studio Warner Bros, Michael Keaton’s version of the caped crusader was dispensed with because producers no longer saw him as a key player in the future of DC, while Batfleck was swiftly recruited from retirement to replace him, then dumped due to new studio boss James Gunn wanting to move forward with a different Dark Knight in the rebranded DC Universe.
Is The Lost Kingdom simply too big to fail, with Warner/DC reeling from box office failures? And how exactly does it fit into Gunn’s plans? On current evidence, it doesn’t. While the ending of Muschietti’s film opened up the possibility of a complete reset of the DC universe, with a new Batman entering into proceedings, Wan’s film features Jason Momoa’s protector of the deep, who is synonymous with the abortive Zack Snyder epoch. Will Momoa-Aquaman somehow survive the shift to a new reality, or is this a different version of the same superhero played by the same actor, like the bit in The Lord of the Rings where a newly Timoteid-up Ian McKellen informs everyone he is suddenly Gandalf the White after falling into a pit of fiery doom and beating down a giant balrog?
Warner and DC have been clear that The Lost Kingdom will be one of the last movies in the DCEU before Gunn takes over. But you have to wonder if all those reshoots might be blurring the lines somewhat between the two eras. After all, nobody who is in the least bit excited about what the new team is going to do in forthcoming films such as Superman: Legacy and Batman: The Brave and the Bold, is going to be in the least bit interested in Wan’s film if it’s flogging a dead horse – and one from another universe at that.