After a little more than a decade, launching with Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel back in 2013, the DC Extended Universe is coming to an end later this year. New DC Studios CEOs James Gunn and Peter Safran are set to create a new canon that will launch in 2025 with the release of Gunn’s Superman: Legacy, and that means concluding the current era of DC blockbusters. That puts the upcoming Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom in an interesting position, the film technically set to be the last DCEU movie… but that’s not something that seems to be having a particularly significant impact on the way director James Wan sees the movie and star Jason Momoa’s superhero future.
In advance of Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom debuting its first trailer today, the filmmaker participated in a press preview event this week, and he was asked about how his upcoming movie fits into the quickly shifting plans for DC Comics on the big screen. Wan expressed that he is obviously “aware” of the current franchise upheaval, but he added that his new movie is in a way built to be independent and insular because so much of it takes place in what is essentially a different world:
I mean, definitely I’m aware of everything that’s happening around me. I use the analogy that I’m living in a house that’s getting renovated, right? And so it’s hard to not be aware of the renovation that’s happening around me. But that’s the beauty about Aquaman 2 and Aquaman 1 – I’ve always designed these two films to be within their own world, and so the advantage about not being hooked into this bigger universe is ultimately whatever happens over there, it doesn’t really affect my movie, right?
There’s no hiding the fact that this is a DC Extended Universe movie – with Jason Momoa reprising his role as Arthur Curry/Aquaman from Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, Justice League, Aquaman, Peacemaker and The Flash – but there is a distance that evidently exists between what’s going on underwater in Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom and what’s going on in the surface world. The main focus is telling a follow-up story to the one that unfolds in 2018’s Aquaman, which, as noted by James Wan, also didn’t have deep-seeded ties into the larger goings on of the DCEU.
In the upcoming blockbuster, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman is having a tough time balancing life as both a father and the King of Atlantis… but things gets far more stressful when Black Manta (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) resurfaces with passion-driven plans to kill the hero. This time around, the villain is outfitted with the powerful and dangerous Black Trident, and in order to both survive and try to save the world, Aquaman must try and team up with his incarcerated brother, Orm (Patrick Wilson).
Further discussing Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom’s relationship with the DCEU, James Wan added,
As you can see in this film, it doesn’t hook into anything; it lives in its own world. And that’s very much what we found worked really well for us on the first film, and we’re doing exactly the same thing. And so sure, there’s noises going around, but I’m just in my cocoon, in my underwater kingdom (laughs).
So what does this mean for the future? Back in January, DC Studios co-CEO (and Aquaman producer) Peter Safran told us that Jason Momoa has envisioned his journey as Arthur Curry being a blockbuster trilogy. That being said, plans for Aquaman as a character have not yet been officially announced in the developing DC Universe, so what will happen with the hero after the release of Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom is unclear. We probably won’t have any official answers about what will happen until at least 2024, but for what it’s worth, James Wan is teasing that the end of his new blockbuster sets up what Aquaman 3 would be. Said the director,
What I can speak to is the Jason Momoa story as Aquaman definitely has more places to go. And yes, when we get to the end of this, the answer is yes. I don’t know how to answer that without kind of giving things away because where we go at the end of this movie, it does tee up something bigger… not bigger, but it does tee up a direction for that story. And I don’t want to speak to that just because it’s the end of the movie.
We’ll just have to wait for the big screen arrival of Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom to get all of the answers we’re craving – and that’s now only about three months away. Featuring a cast that also includes Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman, and Temuera Morrison, the new film will be in theaters everywhere on December 20. Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for more updates about the release, and head over to our Upcoming DC Movies and Upcoming DC TV guides to learn about everything that the comic book franchise has coming in the next few years.