Before the first trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was revealed publicly on Thursday (you can watch it right here), Warner Bros showed the trailer to members of the press at an event on Wednesday, with director James Wan presenting. Speaking and fielding questions for nearly a half-hour, Wan touched on nearly every major talking point about the film–including how the sequel will be handling Amber Heard’s character, and how it accommodates, or ignores, all the changes happening at DC Studios lately.
Chief among those changes being that James Gunn and producer Peter Safran are now running the show at DC, and are in the process of rebooting the big-screen DC universe–an effort that has seemingly become more urgent after a bunch of disappointing box office performances in a row for what should be a juggernaut of a franchise. Since it’s a sequel to a movie that came out five years ago, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom would appear to be a vestige of the existing franchise, rather than a part of whatever’s next. But maybe that whole discussion is immaterial.
“Definitely I’m aware of everything that’s happening around me. I use the analogy that I’m living in a house that’s getting renovated, right. And so it’s hard to not be aware of the renovation that’s happening around me,” Wan said of the upheaval. “But that’s the beauty about Aquaman 2 and Aquaman 1. I’ve always designed these two films to be within their own world. And so the advantage about not being hooked into this bigger universe is ultimately whatever happens over there, it doesn’t really affect my movie, right?