Warner Bros. isn’t having a great summer. The studio had hyped The Flash up as “one of the greatest superhero movies of all-time,” only for it to humiliatingly crater at the box office and potentially lose hundreds of millions of dollars. The smaller-scale Blue Beetle is coming next, but it’s this winter’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom that’ll finally close out the old DCEU before the James Gunn era begins.
As 2018’s Aquaman is a member of the billion-dollar club, expectations should be high for the sequel, but right now it’s prognosis negative. Test screenings have been uniformly damning, with reports naming it as “one of the worst DCEU movies.” Ouch.
Director James Wan is keeping his head held high, though, as he revealed in an interview with ComicBook:
“Well, Aquaman – even the first film – has always been a very standalone film. That was always our approach: that it kind of lives in its own world, and that’s kind of how we’ve approached The Lost Kingdom as well. You know, people love Jason Momoa; people love him playing this role; and people love the action visuals of this space and this world. And that’s what we’re doing: we’re taking it to the next level and we are still expanding – and just any fans of Aquaman the character, that love Black Manta, this is the next level and I’m very excited to finally put out there to show them what we’ve been working on all these years.”
Wan can take some comfort in that the Warner Bros. test audiences don’t have a sterling track record. For example, The Flash received glowing reviews and was apparently “exceptionally well-received.” Perhaps these people simply don’t know what a good movie is – and we should be skeptical of anyone who genuinely enjoyed truly awful The Flash.
We should get an official The Lost Kingdom trailer soon. Expectations are currently at rock bottom for Wan’s sequel, so the only way to go from here is up. That said, with the recent burst of publicity about Gunn’s casting for Superman: Legacy, we’re betting that Warner Bros. just wants the final vestiges of the old DCEU out of the way as soon as humanly possible.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom hits theaters on Dec. 20.
