After the overwhelming disappointment that was last November’s Justice League, we’ve come to expect that the future of the Worlds of DC franchise will be mostly standalone. Despite his starring role in 2017’s team-up movie, then, we weren’t expecting Jason Momoa’s first solo vehicle, Aquaman to reference that film’s events very much, and it turns out we were right.
For the most part, the narrative is mostly disconnected from what went on in Justice League. However, the movie does feature one key reference to the time when Arthur Curry joined forces with the likes of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman to save the world.
When Mera comes to Amnesty Bay to get Arthur to help her stop King Orm from waging a war against the surface world, she tries to convince the reluctant hero by reminding him that he previously helped rescue Atlantis when he aided in the defeat of the Apokoliptian general Steppenwolf. The alien warmonger even gets a direct name-check, while the rest of the League go unmentioned.
This is a welcome callback to Justice League, but just the barest mention of Arthur’s peers does raise the question of where the heck are they during all of this? The six of them seemed like pretty good pals by the end of the film, so it’s surprising that Arthur didn’t call on, say, the billionaire reach of Bruce Wayne or the ancient knowledge of Diana Prince when searching the globe for the Trident of Atlan.
This could be fixed in a potential Aquaman 2, though. Momoa has said that, out of the rest of the League, he’d want to team up again with Ezra Miller’s Flash and Gal Gadot’s Wondy in the sequel. That’d be a lot of fun, and feasible, too, as both stars are committed to more projects in the DC universe, unlike the unknown futures of Henry Cavill and Ben Affleck. But for now, we’ll just have to wait and see if it’ll happen.