James Wan says canceled Aquaman spin-off The Trench was secretly a Black Manta solo movie
The superhero movie that nobody wanted actually might've been a cool thing about a character that fans like
Sorry, comic book movie fans, but you beefed it. The entire movie industry is built around giving you what you want, whether it’s Marvel characters talking about DC characters or Brendan Fraser appearing in two HBO Max superhero things, and the one time somebody comes at you with a bad pitch for a superhero movie that nobody could possibly want, what do you do? You allow your general disinterest to spread so far that Warner Bros. actually cancels the project.
We’re talking about The Trench, of course, which was a spin-off of James Wan’s Aquaman that seemed like one of the most inexplicable ideas for a comic book movie in the history of comic book movies. In case you somehow forgot, it would’ve been about the mindless deep sea monsters that showed up for one action sequence in the original movie, stripping out all of the things that made Aquaman a hit and replacing them with… nothing? Anyway, The Trench was confirmed as being canceled earlier this year, and nobody in the world was surprised.
But, again, ya’ll beefed it so hard on this one, because James Wan now says that The Trench would’ve actually been a cool thing that you would’ve liked. In the comments of an Instagram post celebrating Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s live-action take on Aquaman baddie Black Manta, Wan revealed that The Trench was actually going to be a “secret” Black Manta solo movie. In other words, the Aquaman spin-off that made no sense and would’ve been about characters that couldn’t possibly carry movie would’ve really made total sense and would’ve revolved around a character people already like.
Whoops! Again: Beefed it. This isn’t really anyone’s fault, since nobody could’ve known that this dumb movie could’ve been a cool movie (other than the people who canceled it, oddly enough), but the lesson here is that we should all trust the movie studios making superhero blockbusters a little more. When they show up with an idea that seems bad, we should say “thank you” and not “this idea seems bad.”