DC just released a brand new Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom trailer with way more footage, so we’ll break it all down. The big thing in this trailer is obviously the Aqua Baby. They’re doing Aqua Baby legit and his name is Arthur Curry Juniors so I’ll explain him as well. And Aquaman 2 in itself is more of a bromance between Aquaman and Orm.
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom will follow Arthur Curry as he manages between being a dad to his son and saving the Seven Kingdoms. Black Manta is coming back with more powers and a Black Trident to destroy Aquaman’s family and take over the Seven Kingdom. Aquaman can’t stop him by himself, so he takes his half-brother Orm’s help to defeat Black Manta.
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom Release Date
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom will be released on December 20, 2023. Initially, it was going to be released last year in the month of December but then it was pushed to March 2023 and then it was finally pushed to December 2023. This film had three major reshoots due to this whole DC movie universe having a reboot.
I know there are lots of questions about how this is going to fit into the larger DC Universe. Technically, it’s a DCEU movie and James Gunn is rebooting everything into the DCU.
There were all those Batman Post-Credits scenes in this Aquaman 2 movie. There was a Ben Affleck Batman Post-Credits scene that they filmed and the Michael Keaton Batman Post-Credits scene. They were both done under different regimes, meant to tie them to different future movies that they had planned to do at the time.
James Wan, who did the movie, wouldn’t say anything about which Batman was in the movie, or if there were any Batman in the movie at all. He explained that the movie isn’t meant to be connected to any of the preexisting movies other than that first Aquaman movie.
So I think that was him just saying this Aquaman isn’t meant to be the same Aquaman from the Flash Post-Credits scene. Meaning that they won’t address anything that happened in The Flash movie during Aquaman 2, which I think will be to its benefit largely, because it’ll be relatively self-contained.
But I also think that that means that probably will not be a Batman post-credits scene anymore. Maybe they’ll just be like some funny post-credits scene referencing something from earlier in the movie.
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom Plot
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom really is leaning heavily on the Aquaman comedy of the first movie, basically the same tone as the first movie. Jason Momoa is basically like the big dumb animal and Orm is like the straight man in their duo throughout the movie. Orm will balance out all of Arthur’s comedy.
Just starting at the beginning of the trailer, they do a custom logo amongst icebergs because that’s where they’re going to get to the Lost Kingdom. The whole idea is that the Lost Kingdom is like the seventh Kingdom of Atlantis.
During the trailer, they feature a flashback with King Atlan Fighting against what looks like an undead king wielding what they’re calling the black trident that Black Manta is using in the present day.
This undead king might be Necrus. He’s actually being played by Pilou Asbaek from Game of Thrones, he played the Euron Greyjoy character. He’s going to be every bit as bad during this too, bad in a good way. Somehow it feels appropriate that Euron Greyjoy is the main villain of this movie. Most of his characters though are special effects. So I don’t know if his face will be visible underneath all that armor.
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Black Manta And The Green Flames
During the trailer, their mother, Alana, tells him that the dark magic of the Black Trident is covering the rest of Atlantis, it is going to consume the entire world.
I think the idea, just based on all this green flame, imbuing all these undead figures, is that it’s just bringing the dead back to life. The funny coincidence is they’re actually kind of doing something similar on the Ahsoka series in the Star Wars universe with all the Knights’ sister zombie powers.
The Knight Sisters use a similar type of green flame energy that they literally call magic. Dave Filoni probably didn’t plan things that way because they’ve been working on this Aquaman 2 movie for a couple of years now.
But it just seems like Black Manta gets himself a bunch of power upgrades. During the trailer, Aquaman says Black Manta is way more powerful than he was last time. Not only does he have a bunch of upgraded gear, just regular human-based technology, but It also seems like he’s working with this undead King Necrus of the Lost Kingdom, who gives him the black Trident, which enables him to fight Aquaman with Atlan’s Trident.
Rip Aquababy
The other big thing in Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom trailer is that Black Manta says a couple of times that he’s going to kill Aquaman’s entire family and burn his entire kingdom, everything that he has. He will burn Aquaman’s father’s house down. Don’t know if he kills his father.
But in the comics, Black Manta is the person who winds up killing Aquaman’s son, Arthur Curry Junior, also known as Aqua Baby. Don’t know if they’re going to roll that hard in this movie. Like I don’t expect them to kill Auqa baby during this movie, but obviously, it’s a really big thing in the comics. It was one of the reasons they caused him to break up with Mera like it broke their marriage apart in the comics. But basically, Black Manta winds up smothering his baby in the comics.
Aqua Baby winds up getting some of his powers some of Mira’s powers and some extra powers on top of that. He has the water-bending powers that Mera had and is kind of like Avatar The Last Airbender water bending. They call them hard water in the DC Universe.
Aqua baby also temporarily gains the power to create life, like he can create sea life and manipulate its molecular structure. So he is actually pretty powerful, but he can’t breathe on dry land. The same with a lot of Highborn Atlanteans. They are probably changing some of that stuff for the movie because you see him on dry land at Aquaman’s father’s house.
What Happened After Aquaman Became The King?
They make a couple of jokes about what’s happened in the year that he’s been king of Atlantis. I think it’s only been about a year since the events of the first movie, just charting the timeline of this.
Then there’s a quick montage of him stopping a bunch of disasters all around Atlantis, like the chaos of all of these half a billion people that he talks about.
The movie seems like it’s going to spend more time showing you what’s happening in and around Atlantis with all these different people. They kind of got into this during the Black Panther 2 movie with Namor and their version of Atlantis in the MCU, which was called Talokan. That was their way around of having this weird copyright battle with DC. They can’t copyright the term Atlantis.
But they said when they were doing the name war character in the MCU, they didn’t want people to immediately think of Aquaman. So they tried to make him feel as different as possible because he does seem a little bit like Aquaman.
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Aquaman’s Parents Will Die In Aquaman 2
There’s a big attack scene where Black Manta comes in and attacks Atlantis with all of his upgraded technology and the Black Trident. You see all this green energy around it and this seems like it’s from the Lost City.
Looks like they’re giving Nicole Kidman way more action scenes in this, she’s going to be part of this big battle. I don’t know, they wind up killing her off. Just feels like they want to pay off Black Manta actually killing some of Aquaman’s family. And they’re probably not going to go as hard as killing his son or killing Mera. So I assume it’s probably going to be either his father or his mother who will wind up sacrificing themselves.
A lot of people wondering about reused shots. Yes, they are from the first movie, they reused some footage from the first movie in the trailer. But I think it’s just because of the flashback that he’s explaining the events of the first movie. Like “I was employed for years ago” and the trailer shows some of the events of the first movie.
Then the dance that Aquaman and his father are doing actually seems like a traditional Maori dance. Something Arthur’s Father’s actor was doing on the set of the Star Wars Mandalorian Season 2 episodes when he was filming Boba Fett stuff.
Bromance Between Aquaman And Orm
Then because Arthur can’t fight them all by himself. He goes to free his brother Orm and it looks like his prison is in the same place where the kingdom of the deserters was in the desert, the Sahara Desert, from the last movie.
The weird thing about this is it actually seems like he has to break him out of prison, even though he’s the king of Atlantis. Like, he is the king of this former nation, which seems like an undead place now because of these undead guards. He has to wear his stealth suit to bust into the prison and break his brother out.
There are a couple of jokes about Orm getting powerful again when he touches water. That’s the whole thing, is that they’re more powerful in water than they are out of water. That was why his prison was on dry land in the driest place you could possibly go in the desert.
Normally, Orm, or like the other Highborn Atlanteans are crazy powerful in water, some more powerful than others, but when they’re out of water, they’re just like a little bit stronger than normal humans. Like you’ve seen Aquaman fight during the Justice League movies when he’s not in the water, he’s still very powerful. But when they’re in water, their power levels go up by like a factor of ten.
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Aquaman-MCU Parallels
Another funny thing you remember is that that’s exactly what Namor’s powers were in the Marvel Universe. There are a couple of jokes about Aquaman just treating Orm like a brother and not wanting to have anything to do with him, and just wanting to save Atlantis. They both want to save Atlantis, but at least at first Orm still kind of hates Aquaman.
I think the idea is that their arc over the movie is eventually they’ll make peace and Orm will like him. They’ll become friends by the end of the film. This is kind of a Thor-Loki thing going on between the two of them too. And the whole idea is that Aquaman isn’t that great at being king, he doesn’t want to be king. Kind of the way Thor was destined to be king, but it was always Loki who wanted to be king.
So early theory right now, Aquaman at the end of the movie tries to abdicate the throne or at least give the throne to Orm and let him be king. The whole idea is that Orm knows what it means to be king, he knows about ruling people, and he’s much better at that kind of stuff than a man would be.
You have to imagine that Aquaman is just way better at being a member of the Justice League fighting inter-dimensional villains, kind of like Darkseid, like really big, really bad cosmic villains. Managing large groups of people though he’s not so great at it.
The Lost Kingdom And Black Manta Leading It
They have this whole Godzilla Hollow Earth thing going on here. This is meant to be the interior of the Lost Kingdom. I think this is inside some sort of iceberg. Either it’s Antarctica or somewhere in the Arctic.
Black Manta finds the Lost Kingdom. When Orm says he means to end the bloodline, he’s talking about Black Manta killing Aquaman and his entire family. That’s just a comic book reference to him killing his son basically.
Orm tries to give Black Manta a pep talk “If you lead the Seven Kingdoms then will follow”. So maybe Aquaman will end the movie still being King of Atlantis, but it does seem like they will be bros by the end of the film.
There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in the trailer. But if you spot any Easter eggs or references that I didn’t talk about in the article, then just share them with me. And there are going to be tons of questions about what Jason Momoa is going to do in future DC movies. Because he said he would always be Aquaman, but he also said that he would be coming back, possibly playing Lobo.
I think he could do both, it’s like the Josh Brolin‘s Thanos and Cable situation where Kevin Feige was like, “Oh yeah, he could come back in the Marvel movies as Cable after playing Thanos just because his characters look so different.
I don’t think the Lobo character is supposed to be in Superman Legacy. That would be like the big tipping point where James Gunn’s new DCU really starts to set off.
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