Although Blue Beetle is next on the upcoming DC movies schedule, when it comes to the DC Extended Universe continuity, there’s only one more entry left: Aquaman 2, a.k.a. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. By the time it arrives as one of the final 2023 new movie releases, it’ll have been five years since Aquaman hit theaters and went on to become the highest-grossing DC movie of all time. However, word’s come in that The Lost Kingdom has been plagued with both reshoot and scheduling problems for a while now, and that’s resulted in some bad news for Batman fans.
You can read through THR’s detailed story about the issues that have made the Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom creative process arguably more complicated than the making of its predecessor, including how there have been three rounds of reshoots and “several uninspired test screenings.” But regarding the Batman update, this is a result of the various scheduling shakeups that movie has went through, as well as a new decree from DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran. Neither Michael Keaton nor Ben Affleck’s versions of the Caped Crusader will appear in the sequel, as they “do not want to promise a movie universe that will not come to fruition, nor tie it down excessively to past failures,” with one source describing this as “pretty chaotic.”
