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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Ben Child

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is in trouble – but is it too big to fail?

Washed up? Jason Momoa in Aquaman.
Washed up? Jason Momoa in Aquaman. Photograph: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy

Back in the 00s, the idea of making an Aquaman movie was deemed so ridiculous that the Hollywood bro comedy Entourage spent much of its second and third seasons taking the mickey out of the idea. In the end, Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) only agrees to star in the superhero epic because box office king James Cameron signs on to direct it.

This, of course, was long before the advent of the Marvel and DC superhero universes, which have since gone on to dominate multiplexes and prove that people really will turn out in their droves to see (for the most part) preposterously entertaining films about spandex-sporting titans as conceptually silly as Shazam!, Star-Lord and Rocket Raccoon. During the peak of the comic book movie era, which on recent evidence appears to be long gone, it seemed as if almost any character from the pages of DC and Marvel could be spun off into their own big screen adventure. If Vin Diesel can be convinced to play a talking tree whose only utterance is “I Am Groot”, you know the creatives behind this are fully aware they are riding a gravy train to the land of psychedelic potentiality.

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