With Aquaman crossing the $1 billion mark at the box office, DC Comics and Warner Bros. are riding high after the misses of Justice League, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad.
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It seems like the direction of DC movies is finally clear after a lot of creative and executive turnover. Warner Bros. Pictures Group Chairman Toby Emmerich spoke about the future for DC movies, saying that they won’t be chasing Marvel Studios’ approach any more.
“We all feel like we’ve turned a corner now. We’re playing by the DC playbook, which is very different than the Marvel playbook,” Emmerich said to the Hollywood Reporter. “We are far less focused on a shared universe. We take it one movie at a time. Each movie is its own equation and own creative entity. If you had to say one thing about us, it’s that it always has to be about the directors.”
Emmerich also referenced Disney’s box office dominance, which seems to be inevitable in the new year with Fox coming into their fold. Warner Bros. won’t be chasing them, and the exec clarified what projects will remain their focus for the future.
“We’re highly focused on DC, on ramping up animation and on movies that contribute to the social conversation,” Emmerich said, in reference to 2018’s hits like Crazy Rich Asians and A Star Is Born.
But Aquaman was what pushed the studio over last year, becoming the first billion-dollar picture since The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey premiered over five years ago. It’s a massive win, and Aquaman has become the most successful DC Comics movie of the modern era and is currently trailing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises.
It seems like a sequel is a no brainer in the wake of this massive success. And star Jason Momoa has a lot of ideas for how to proceed.
“I definitely have an opinion,” Momoa said to Syfy Wire. “Even when we were shooting Aquaman, I have the opening of Aquaman 2 ready. I went in and pitched it to [producer Peter] Safran, and I pitched it to [Warner Bros. chairman] Toby Emmerich. They loved it. It’s awesome…But yeah, I have plans for Aquaman 2.”
Director James Wan is unsure if hell commit to a sequel at this point, as he told ComicBook.com.
“I mean, liking the people I work with goes a long way,” Wan said. “That was the reason why I came back when I did Insidious 2. But it’s a weird one for me, because I actually don’t know what I want to do next for the first time in my career. I felt like Aquaman ticked a lot of boxes for me. I want to do another action movie after Furious 7, I wanted to do a world creation film, and I wanted to do a superhero movie, and Aquaman literally ticked all of those boxes for me. And so right now, I’m in that sort of place of like do I kind of go back and do a smaller movie maybe as my next one, something a bit more intimate. Or if I can do a personal movie, but maybe it’s on a bigger scale. I’m not sure at this point.”
Aquaman is now playing in theaters.
