As you may have heard already, Aquaman has proven to be a pretty big deal at the box office, raking in more than $1.1 billion worldwide and surpassing The Dark Knight Rises to become the highest-grossing DC movie of all time. It was therefore less than surprising when the news broke last month that Aquaman 2 is in development, and now it seems that Warner Bros. has a date in place for the film’s release.
Deadline reports that Arthur Curry’s second solo movie is scheduled to hit theaters on December 16th, 2022. This suggests a wait of almost four years between the release of the first and second Aquaman films, indicating that Warner has no desire to rush things. In the meantime, we still have much to learn about the follow-up, though it’s been reported that Aquaman cowriter and frequent James Wan collaborator David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick has been tapped to pen the script. Speaking of Wan, while it remains to be seen if the first movie’s director will be returning to the helm, both he and Peter Safran are at least producing the sequel.
Aquaman 2 is one of two projects that the success of Wan’s flick seems to have spawned, the other being the spinoff titled The Trench, with Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald said to be working on a “horror-tinged script” centered on the titular creatures.
Regardless, it sounds like we still have quite a wait ahead of us before either of these Aquaman-related projects make their way to screens, though the DCEU has plenty more releases to keep us occupied for the next few years, the first being Shazam!,which comes out on April 5th, 2019. After that, 2020 will see the release of Birds of Prey on February 7th, followed by Wonder Woman 1984 on June 5th. Then in 2021, we have The Batman coming out on June 25th and The Suicide Squad on August 6th. It’s only after all those projects are out of the way that Aquaman 2 will finally be completing its journey to cinemas on December 16th, 2022.