Jeff Nichols Reveals Scrapped Plans for Dark Aquaman Movie

New details have surfaced about Jeff Nichols’ never-made Aquaman movie. In 2014, the infamous Sony email hack revealed that the Mud and Midnight Special filmmaker was in talks to direct Jason Momoa as the DC superhero in the Justice League spin-off, then dated for July 27th, 2018. (Warner Bros. ultimately tapped Furious 7 filmmaker James Wan to direct Aquaman, which swam to $1.1 billion at the worldwide box office to become DC’s highest-grossing film when it hit theaters in December 2018.) In a new interview, Nichols said that his failed Aquaman pitch was inspired by Peter David’s seminal ’90s run that dramatically reinvented the aquatic hero as a long-haired, bearded badass with a harpoon hand. 

“I still have scenes from [Aquaman] in my head that would’ve beengood,” Nichols said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in an interview for his Jodie Comer and Austin Butler-led drama The Bikeriders. “They would’ve been quite different from the filmthat was made. It wasn’t ever feasible…I liked the older Aquaman, likewhen he had a harpoon for a hand. He was a fallen king and his son haddied. He was in mourning.”

“Obviously, from this brief pitch, you can see itwould’ve sold hundreds of dollars worth of tickets,” Nichols joked. “That stuff is fun to noodle on, but we got a lot of those movies now. There are a lot of stories in the world. It’s OK tospend time time telling some other ones.”

David’s darker Aquaman run introduced Koryak, the illegitimate son of Aquaman and the Inuit woman Kako. 1994’s Aquaman #0 established the new look for the character, with Aquaman #2 revealing that Aquaman replaced his missing hand with a golden harpoon after the villain Charybdis fed the sea king’s hand to flesh-eating piranhas. 

“I decided that I had to radically change his appearance, that thatwould be a good start. So I gave him the long hair and I gave him thebeard, and I developed the idea of him losing his right hand and havingit replaced with a harpoon. I thought that would make him look a lotmore dynamic,” David told webzine DC in the ’80s in 2018. “I mean, if the old Aquaman walks into aroom, you’d go, ‘Hey Aquaman! What’s going on?’ If the long-hairedbearded guy with a scowl walks in and he’s got a harpoon on his arm,you’re gonna go, ‘Um, yes? What can I do to help you, sir? don’t killme.’ I wanted that kind of gravity to his appearance — so that when thisguy walked into a room — you KNEW he was a bad-ass. He was NOT someoneyou wanted to screw with.”

Momoa returns in DC’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, scheduled to release in theaters December 20th.