We’re still seventeen months away from DCEU sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom swimming into theaters, but Johnny Depp fans have been threatening to boycott the movie for just as long, so it’s reasonable to expect that their stance isn’t going to change between now and December 16th, 2022.
In fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call Warner Bros. the least favorite studio among the former Pirates of the Caribbean star’s legion of supporters, after they forced him to resign from Fantastic Beasts 3 and swiftly hired Mads Mikkelsen to step in as Grindelwald, while Amber Heard remains gainfully employed as the female lead on the follow up to the most commercially successful DC Comics adaptation in history.
Boycotts of both the aforementioned blockbusters have been threatened, social media has blasted Aquaman 2 at every available opportunity based solely on Heard’s involvement, while petitions to see her fired have racked up millions upon millions of signatures.
However, producer Peter Safran doesn’t care. In a new interview, he admitted that while he’s fully aware of the noise, a vocal band of fans aren’t going to influence the outcome on a production that’s costing hundreds of millions of dollars to put together.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to react to, honestly, pure fan pressure. You gotta do what’s best for the movie. We felt that if it’s James Wan, and Jason Momoa, it should be Amber Heard. That’s really what it was. One is not unaware of what is going on in the Twitter-verse, but that doesn’t mean you have to react to it or take it as gospel or accede to their wishes. You have to do what’s right for the film, and that’s really where we landed on it.”
Aquaman surprised a lot of people when it went on to earn in excess of $1.1 billion at the box office, so it’ll be interesting to see if the constant threat of a boycott looming overhead will have any noticeable impact on how the sequel performs. James Wan’s second installment is coming burdened with pressure and expectations that the first movie didn’t have to contend with, and a legion of army Johnny Depp fans is something the filmmaker wouldn’t have accounted for.