The first trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom finally arrives tomorrow, but before we get our best look at the final DCEU movie, director James Wan is already batting down negative perceptions. Rumors have been flying around about three rounds of reshoots, which obviously does not sound good. But in a piece with EW, Wan downplays the reshoots as having more to do with logistics than the film’s quality…
“We have big actors in this movie, and everyone’s schedule is really hard,” Wan said. “So, we had to break up our shooting schedule into sections. We’ll shoot a bit here now, because this actor’s available, and then we’ll do another shoot now, because this guy’s available. People are like, ‘Oh, they’re doing a whole bunch of different shoots!’ No. If we actually combined them all together, it’s actually not that many number of days at all.”
Wan has dealt with reshoot issues before, in particular with his Conjuring films, and those have turned out to be huge box office hits with generally strong reviews. Wan seems to know what he’s doing, and he’s not wrong that it’s tough to coordinate the schedules of so many A-list actors.
“Additional photography is never a negative thing,” Wan continued. “I find new things and I come up with new ideas. “The Conjuring 2” was the perfect example of me putting the whole movie together and then — bing! — a lightbulb went off in my head, and I go, ‘I know what I need to do.’ Same here as well.”
2018’s Aquaman scored the biggest box office of any DCEU film with $1.4B. Will Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom measure up? We’ll find out when it opens on December 20th.
