After myriad delays, James Wan‘s “Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom” hits theaters on December 20, bringing the DCEU to a close. And despite all those release changes, Warner Bros. Discovery has high hopes for the sequel since 2018’s “Aquaman” was the most lucrative DCEU movie to date, taking in $1.148 billion at the global box office. But with news of extensive reshoots, some doubt “The Lost Kingdom” will replicate the original film’s success. So what does James Wan have to say about all of this?
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EW reports that while Wan doesn’t deny that post-production on his sequel included three rounds of additional photography, he blames it on the busy schedules of his A-list cast and not on the film itself. “We have big actors in this movie, and everyone’s schedule is really hard,” Wan said. “So, we had to break up our shooting schedule into sections. We’ll shoot a bit here now, because this actor’s available, and then we’ll do another shoot now, because this guy’s available. People are like, ‘Oh, they’re doing a whole bunch of different shoots!’ No. If we actually combined them all together, it’s actually not that many number of days at all.”
What Wan told EW is technically true: most reshoots on films don’t take very long, and generally involve sprucing up only a handful of shots. And Wan’s post-production amendments have been successful before. Take his other 2018 film “The Conjuring 2” as an example. The director retouched “this big demon” he wanted as an antagonist in that sequel and changed it to the Demon Nun instead. That character eventually starred in two films of her own, “The Nun,” and “The Nun II,” which hit theaters last week. “Additional photography is never a negative thing,” Wan explained to EW. “I find new things and I come up with new ideas. “The Conjuring 2” was the perfect example of me putting the whole movie together and then — bing! — a lightbulb went off in my head, and I go, ‘I know what I need to do.’ Same here as well.”
That may be the case for “The Conjuring 2,” but this new “Aquaman” film has entirely different issues that Wan can’t blame solely on the schedules of its in-demand cast. Obviously, Jason Momoa, Patrick Wilson, and Nicole Kidman are busy people, but there’s also Amber Heard, and all of the toxic drama she brings to the table. Her trial against ex-husband Johnny Depp was perhaps the most publicized story out of Hollywood last year. And the result? A pared down role in “The Lost Kingdom,” which Wan insists was his intention all along. “I always pitched this to everyone from the get-go,” Wan told EW. “The first “Aquaman” was Arthur and Mera’s journey. The second movie was always going to be Arthur and Orm. So, the first was a romance action-adventure movie, the second one is a bromance action-adventure movie. We’ll leave it at that.”
Should we believe Wan about the reshoots and Heard’s less significant role in “The Lost Kingdom”? Or is this just optics on the part of a director and the studio that backs him in the hopes that audiences will look past a rocky production schedule for a film that’s part of a franchise in flux? It may be a little bit of both, but audiences won’t know for sure until the film hits theaters in December. The sequel stars Momoa as Arthur Curry again, on a new adventure to track down Yahya Abdul-Mateen II‘s Black Manta, who’s acquired the powerful Black Trident as his new superweapon. To take down his nemesis, Curry must team up with his half-brother Orm, played by Wilson, and travel to an underwater kingdom forgotten by history.
“Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom” arrives on December 20. Will the sequel be a worthy, horror-tinged follow-up to the 2018 or a trash fire that ends the DCEU on the sourest of notes? Stay tuned on that.
