Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is in uncharted waters and the next few weeks may take their course, for better or for worse.
The Warner Bros. sequel According to multiple sources, the 2018 DC film stems from a series of reshoots that took place in New Zealand in mid-June and starred the likes of Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson.
This is the third round of reshoots for the James Wan-directed film. That’s an almost unprecedented number, even for a film of this magnitude.
Lost Kingdom faced several headwinds en route to its December 20 release date. The film has been delayed several times (it was originally slated for a December 2022 release), and like its DC film cousin The Flash, its creation has now spanned three stages at Warners.
The film was greenlit under the Warners regime, led by former film executive Toby Emmerich and his deputy, DC Films executive Walter Hamada, as a sequel to Aquaman, which proved to be a surprise hit and the highest-grossing DC film of all time applies with 1.148 billion US dollars.
Principal photography wrapped in January 2022, but by the summer Emmerich was out (Hamada soon followed), both victims of the merger that created Warner Bros. Discovery.
The film was in the middle of post-production this summer and began test screenings. Though a timeline isn’t clear, The Lost Kingdom was reshot twice from summer 2022 to early 2023 and had several uninspiring test screenings.
After a round of test screenings, new Warners film executives Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy chimed in as they had the edge at DC until David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, could find a permanent DC executive to replace Hamada . Sources say Abdy took a strong creative stance in the fall and took part in editing a cut. However, when testing this version, it performed worse than the previous version. This led to another round of re-recordings.
Regardless of the executives’ differing views, it’s unclear where the problems lay, but an insider said the underlying issue of story clarity is an ongoing issue.
Also in focus: Batman.
Hamada wanted Michael Keaton’s version of the Marvel movies’ character to resemble Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury – an elder statesman who could appear in various films including Batgirl, which has since been shelved, and Das lost kingdom”. But the postponement of the release dates messed everything up. The Lost Kingdom was originally slated to hit theaters in March 2023, several months before Keaton’s return in The Flash in June 2023. In late July 2022, two months after Abdy and DeLuca Warners took over, Ben Affleck joined a series of reshoots as Bruce Wayne to replace a scene Keaton had shot. But then the film was pushed back again, this time after Flash, threatening Affleck’s performance. Sources say the latest iteration of the film won’t feature a version of the Dark Knight because new DC bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran don’t want to promise a movie universe that doesn’t come to fruition, nor do they want to overly tie it to past failures. “It was pretty messy,” said a source.
(And some of the chaos may not have been the studio’s or the filmmakers’ fault. Some of the calendar shifts were due to overworked visual effects houses, a phenomenon that emerged during the pandemic that affected both Flash and Lost Kingdom, causing a cascade of Release date shifted.)
Further test screenings of cuts took place in February and again in April. At this point, Safran, who produced Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom, co-headed the newly formed DC Studios with Gunn.
It’s unclear how Safran’s transition changed the fortunes of the film, if at all. Insiders say the filmmakers were at their wits’ end due to the seemingly never-ending post-production process and overflowing test results. However, the skies may have cleared with the new recordings.
Gunn is said to have commented on the recent cut and the leadership agreed to a five-day shoot. According to sources, filming went so well that Wan and co. completed what they needed in just four minutes.
And for some, the fact that Warners continues to spend money to make the film better shows that the studio has faith in The Lost Kingdom. (Sources say the filmmakers of Blue Beetle, the other remaining DC movie shot during the AT&T era and coming out in August, asked for two extra days of filming in February, but the studio turned it down. Safran was also a producer on Beetle before he rose to the executive level.)
Lost Kingdom is already an expensive production. Approved with a budget of $205 million, the film was shot during the pandemic, a onerous expense for tentpole productions. In addition, visual effects are required in every frame of the film, another major expense. The new additions have only increased the overall budget.
Lost Kingdom is the final film in the DC Extended Universe, which started a decade ago with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. The December release date is fast approaching as Warners DC movies are flopping at unprecedented levels. Black Adam in October, Shazam in March! Fury of the Gods (also produced by Safran) and last month’s The Flash were money losers in their theatrical releases. Though Gunn and Safran plan to reboot DC movies with Superman: Legacy, that title won’t be out until July 2025. No one wants another failure and it begs the question of how much pressure the DC film brand can take.
The filmmakers and studio know the value intelligent post-production can bring. The first “Aquaman” also faced turbulent waves and is said to have only found its footing in the post when a new ending was polished and the film was shortened to two hours and twenty-three minutes.
Wan was optimistic Speaking to THR in April while continuing to work on the film: “This film has a story to tell [climate change]but it’s still a fun action-fantasy movie.”