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If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know Warner’s “Aquaman” – not surprisingly – has a post end-credits sequence that sets up the next film – and by the looks of the box-office returns on the thing, there will be a sequel.
Spoiler warning!
Turn back now if you don’t want anything ruined!
OK, once more with feeling…
SPOILERS FOLLOW!
OK, so – and I’m guessing anyone reading this far would have – since you’ve seen the film and the end stinger, you’ll know it pertains to marine biologist Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park) seemingly teaming up with Yahya Abdul-Mateen‘s Black Manta (the support rogue of the film).
Shin finds Manta drifting in the ocean, following the film’s final moments, and nurses him back to health.
Why all the niceties from Shin? Well he wants insight into Manta’s Atlantean gadgetry. “Sure”, says Manta, who holds Arthur Curry directly responsible for the death of his father. “But first, you’ve gotta tell me how to find him,” says Manta, then hurling his knife towards a newspaper article ‘Who is Aquaman?’.
While director James Wan knows some might have preferred to see more from Shin in the current film, he assumes (he’s not contracted to helm at this point) the unlikely duo of Shin and Manta will be a bigger focus of the sequel as they try take down the underwater kingdom together.
“There’s no need to use all of it”, Wan tells USA Today of not featuring more characters in the current hit. “Already, I feel like I have so many things I needed to kind of put in there just in terms of the origin. The main story line needed to be about the throne of Atlantis. And if it’s about the throne of Atlantis, then that means that his antagonism is with his brother, King Orm.”
That said, “I knew going into an ‘Aquaman’ movie, fans would riot if I didn’t have Black Manta in this someplace,” Wan says. “I had to walk that tightrope of, ‘OK, if I’m going to bring these characters in, how can I make the story overall cohesive, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just jamming this character in there just for the sake of jamming him in there?’ ”
In an exclusive interview with Moviehole yesterday, co-writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick said quite a few characters were cut from the final shooting script – including some of Curry’s superfriends.
“We discussed doing that and it was a fun thing to get to write, but it was the decision to have Aquaman stand on his own two feet that was the right way to go”, the scribe says, hinting that earlier drafts likely included cameos from other Justice League members.
“Aquaman” is now showing.
