Aquaman director James Wan recently claimed that it was the crazy underwater world inhabited by Arthur Curry that convinced him to pick this DCEU project over The Flash, but it seems that even the Conjuring helmsman had his limits on just how out-there he was willing to go in the film’s subaquatic set pieces.
In an interview with Collider, Wan recalled how co-writer Will Beall came up with a scene where Aquaman starts a riot in a prison guarded by sharks, and apparently the sequence only got loopier from there:
“He had a really quirky out-there [sequence]…it wasn’t the studio, it was me that said, ‘I don’t know if we can have that in there, that’s a bit weird.’ As much as I loved it.
“He had this sequence where…Aquaman has been apprehended by King Orm and he’s been thrown into this dungeon. Like this really awful prison deep in Atlantis. He ends up starting a prison riot, where all the guards are sharks. They were shark-guards, like all shark head…and he kills one of the shark guards and the shark starts bleeding and then that starts a feeding frenzy among all the other shark guards. It just went nuts. We’re talking like clouds of blood billowing everywhere and he uses that to escape. I was like ‘Holy crap, I don’t know if I can do that.’”
As amazing as this set piece could’ve been, it definitely sounds like it would’ve been tricky to pull off. Just last week, Wan described the difficulty of filming his underwater passages in an interview with the New York Times, recalling how “A simple scene of two people talking underwater would just take days and days to shoot.” Imagine how long this epic and bloody clash between prisoners and shark guards would’ve taken to film.
That being said, while this particular sequence didn’t make it as far as production, the feature still pits Arthur against some ferocious underwater creatures, with Wan claiming that he pitched Aquaman to DC as “a horror monster movie.” Well, what did you expect from a director who’s also considered rebooting Blade and making a Batman horror film?
In any case, Wan’s approach seems to have gone down well with viewers overseas, with the flick recently surpassing the $260 million mark in global gross, and if the domestic projections are anything to go by, then North American audiences are similarly ready to give Aquaman its due. You can find out if the movie is good enough to make up for its lack of underwater prison bloodbaths when the film hits theaters on December 21st.