As production continues on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, more and more information surrounding the project is seeping out, with a quartet of new additions added to the ensemble just the other day. Three of them are potential foes for Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry, so he’ll have a lot on his plate to deal with second time out.
The first installment never took itself too seriously, and provided an entertainingly bizarre blast of comic book escapism, so fingers crossed director James Wan is doubling down on the insanity. We’ll never experience the rush of seeing an octopus playing a drum solo for the first time again, but in a new interview with Fandango, Momoa teased that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom will be bigger, better, bolder and funnier.
“We all learned something on the first one. It’s exciting because I haven’t made too many sequels. I just know that it’s, even on the page, it’s absolutely wonderful. There is so much going on. I think the stakes are a lot higher. There’s a lot of comedy. So, I mean, I giggled reading it. There’s a lot of fun, and definitely the action’s bigger. I think just in the last three or four years, technology is constantly evolving, it’s just moving at such a rapid pace that what we’re doing with underwater sequences. I mean, that’s what made the first one so amazing. It’s just gone on to a whole other level, so I’m excited for everyone because it’s just a lot more heart. There’s a lot more at risk.”
Not that the stakes weren’t high in the opener; Arthur had to deal with his royal lineage, cope with the dual threats of Black Manta and Vorm, all while ascending to the throne of Atlantis, but it was the standard ‘superhero embraces the destiny they initially turned their back on’ origin story we’ve seen countless times before.
Now that the world-building is out of the way, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is free to take the franchise is new and exciting directions, which should ensure that it doesn’t fall into the same repetitive traps that blight many blockbuster sequels, especially with Wan and Momoa leading the charge.
