Ironically, you have to go all the way back to the immediate aftermath of James Wan’s Aquaman to find the last DCEU movie that wasn’t a box office disappointment, with its successor Shazam! proving to be one of the franchise’s most profitable installment.
Since then, audiences have largely shunned Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman 1984, The Suicide Squad, Black Adam, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, and Blue Beetle, with this December’s sequel Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom not just the sequel to the highest-grossing DCEU chapter ever, but the most lucrative comic book adaptation in company history.
Artfully dancing around the rumors of extensive reshoots and changeovers between Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton, director Wan instead opted to make a point of noting to Entertainment Weekly that the best thing about his follow-up is that it’s got nothing to do with anything.
“At the end of the day, the best thing I would say about this movie is that it is not connected in any way to any of those films. That’s the bottom line.”
Standalone superhero blockbusters are becoming rarer and rarer in modern Hollywood, and it might be for the best for Aquaman 2 to flip the bird at the decade-long history that preceded it, for the sole purpose of potentially avoiding the pitfalls that have seen the struggling saga flatline so often in the last half a decade.
It remains to be seen whether or not it can live up to the hype, but Wan is at least making a fist of attempting to tell a self-contained story before James Gunn wipes the slate mostly clean.