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
Aux News James Wan
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.”
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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.”
Excuse me, what?
The real lesson is that the current WB has terrible leadership who have no idea in what they’re doing.
Given how often the car that is the DCEU drives off a cliff, I’m beginning to wonder if Toonces is in charge of the whole company.
Yeah, it’s not the fans’ fault that the Trench movie was cancelled. It was announced along with a whole lot of movies that people were more interested in that also got cancelled because WB never knew what it wanted to do with any of it’s superhero properties and was just throwing everything against the wall.Also I don’t see why a Black Manta movie would be any better.
I nver get this “throw against the wall analogy” for DC movies since most of the ones they announced were for mainstream superheroes everybody expect DC would adapt. I figured they were said by people who have no idea that Wonder Woman or The Flash exists. And ironically one of their most successful movie was Suicide Squad which was one of their more unconventional ideas but made sense to most comic book readers.
Gotham City Sirens? Birds of Prey? Green Lantern Corps? The Trench? the Joker? New Gods? Black Adam? Hell, Suicide Squad? These are not “mainstream superheroes everybody expect DC would adapt.” They certainly weren’t the kind of movie you announce before you know how well Justice League is going to do.
I don’t know. Most of those make plenty of sense. Gotham City Sirens is Harley, Poison Ivy, and Catwoman, three very popular Batman villains that a lot of people would probably already know. Birds of Prey is a Harley movie with a supporting cast. Maybe people don’t know the supporting cast very well but centering it around Harley fixes that problem.Sure, the Green Lantern movie was a stinker, but it’s a concept the public is familiar with and has a semi-recent comics run that, like Guardians of the Galaxy, could easily become its own little corner of the universe.The Trench is a stretch but they were clearly just looking for ways to capitalize on the success of Aquaman. It’s not a slam dunk but based on this article I can at least see what they were thinking. Joker made over a billion dollars. That one doesn’t need me to argue for it. New Gods is a bonkers idea for a movie. I can’t argue with that.Black Adam is only happening because The Rock is involved.Suicide Squad is maybe not incredibly well known but it’s the Dirty Dozen with super villains. It’s a solid concept you can use to carry over existing villains or launch new ones.
Most of the movies you mentioned were announced as a reaction to other more successful DC movies, while Green Lantern is one of their A-list characters. A movie centered around The Joker is also not that weird considering how the character has evolved over the years.
You might want to hit the dismiss button on Syafiqjabar of Mars. He’s a Snyder Cultist who likes to use marginalized people as props to frame Zach Snyder as a white savior…He lives in his own little world…
The movies will never be as good as the cartoons. Wonder woman was better, but not great.
Every DECU filmmaker should send Zack Snyder a giant Christmas gift every year for making movies that were so incredibly bad that all of the other middling entries in the franchise have seemed pleasantly enjoyable by comparison.
Holy shit, it’s 2021. But oh yeah, this AV Club whose readers are the C-SPAM fans of pop culture ever since most of the writers left.
this AV ClubHulk sad.
His movies aren’t that bad. His Justice League got around 71%-75% RT score from critics, and in the 50s on Metacritic. Right now Eternals is doing the same numbers and critics still say it’s good. Both reviewed well enough. Definitely not “incredibly bad”.
This is AV Club where if you don’t hate Snyder you must be an incel.
Holy shit this place figured out a way to shadow ban and not just make me grey, because i pointed out that Black men are the group of people most likely to be murdered. After months of not figuring out how to make their crap site work in the most minor of ways
“His movies aren’t that bad.
Yes. They are.
“His Justice League got around 71%-75% RT score from critics, and in the 50s on Metacritic.”
So?
I was surprised by how watchable his Justice League cut was, but I was mostly surprised because of how unwatchable BvS was. It’s one of the few movies I hope to never have to sit through again. Incredibly bad might be off when discussing his overall DC output, but when it gets bad it gets really, really, really bad.
I went out the theater pretty much pissed after BvS, but the Ultimate Edition turned me around so hard. Like, I watch it as one of my comfort movies lol. The theatrical cut was a mess of multiple plotlines, and it wasn’t until the Ultimate cut that I got the whole picture.
I’ve seen the Ultimate Cut once but it didn’t really fix anything for me. Sure, the convective tissue is better and it feels more like an actual movie rather than a random assemblage of scenes, but that’s probably like the nicest thing I could say about it. It’s like doing minor renovations on a house that has a rotting foundation. There’s really only so much you can do if you’re not tearing it all down and starting from scratch. I can’t think of a way to fix that movie that doesn’t involve a page one rewrite.
I personally find that many people’s reasoning for disliking that movie is simply “it’s not what I want to see”. From a script standpoint, I think it’s pretty tight and concise. Its greatest sin is not being the “Superman/Batman” movie people wanted.But that’s life, I guess. I enjoyed Black Widow enough, but I also think it was objectively among the worst superhero movies I’ve seen. But I’ve seen people say they think it was one of the best. It happens.
That’s probably the case for some people. I’m generally fine with alternate takes on existing properties. Why just make something again in another format without putting your own spin on it?I just don’t think BvS is any good. The script is kind of a mess and doesn’t do any work to make us care about the characters. Cavill, who I thought was fine but unremarkable in Man of Steel, gives one of the most charismaless performances I’ve ever seen. It’s kind of wild to compare how much fun he is to watch in Mission Impossible with how much of an empty void he is in BvS. The action scenes, generally Snyder’s strength, are all kind of dull (other than the warehouse fight which is pretty solid).I was one of the many people who thought Snyder’s Justice League would be a complete debacle and that the Whedon version, while not great, would be the clear favorite. I was kind of shocked that I sort of liked the Snyder cut. I don’t think it’s a great movie. It’s way too long and there’s a lot that should be on the cutting room floor, but I guess when you have full control and the studio doesn’t care about length you just go for it. Can’t say I blame him.
Let’s not pretend this movie would’ve been good if it weren’t for Zach Snyder. Black Manta is not complex like Black Adam . Nor was he entertaining like Harley Quinn. The Trench isn’t that interesting like Themyscira. This thing reeks of a movie nobody asked for staring a villain nobody liked about a section of the ocean noone cares about. You can’t put the failure of this project at the feet of Zach Snyder because his movies DO sound better than whatever this thing was supposed to be.
You might want to hit the dismiss button on Syafiqjabar of Mars. He’s a Snyder Cultist who likes to use marginalized people as props to frame Zach Snyder as a white savior…He lives in his own little world…
The Trench were the best part of that movie, I’d watch a whole movie about them with or without Black Manta.
Yeah… I don’t get why people would think a famously adept horror director making a movie centered around another movie’s horror-esque creatures would not be entertaining…? Considering the success of the Saw franchise, the Conjuring universe, and the Insidious movies… if the guy wants to do a horror thing, people and the studio would be wise to let him do it.
Then they should have announced it as “Black Manta vs. The Trench” so we actually gave a shit instead of “That movie about that one scene from Aquaman”
After Trump became President, they shouldn’t have put too much stake into public opinion. Then again, a lot of the people who worked at WB ended up working for Trump too.
You might want to hit the dismiss button on Syafiqjabar of Mars. He’s a Snyder Cultist who likes to use marginalized people as props to frame Zach Snyder as a white savior…He lives in his own little world…
Did the fans beef it? Or does the fault lie with someone who thought “Hey, I’ve got a secret project. Rather than just letting it sit under a tarp with a vague code name stenciled in, perhaps some sort of anagram or something, I’m going to pretend it’s something weird and off the wall and expect people to get excited about it without context?”I mean, the answer could well be both. But unless James Wan was planning on going to WB and saying “Hey, you know that ‘Trench’ movie I’ve been working on for six months? It was actually a ‘Black Manta’ movie! You made a comic book movie without knowing it!”, pretending to do a spinoff about ‘The Trench’ (which was cool) is just so very dumb.
When they say “secret” it’s a secret to the public, not to the people running the company making it, and one the public would probably know before the first trailer is teased. So this is more a case of WB being too boneheaded to see the potential in a character-based movie if it’s not major superhero or played by a superstar like The Rock. Or maybe like so many comic book readers in the past they wanted to make this movie until Black Manta removed his mask and they remark with surprise: “Wait, this main character is black (but not The Rock)!”
Well, right, I get that, I was trying to be funny and it didn’t quite land. My point was that disguising a movie as a completely different fake movie is a stupid way to keep it a secret, especially if there’s any chance a fan backlash against the fake movie would somehow affect whether the real movie gets made. They could have just said “James Wan is working on a DC movie, code-named Something Innocuous” instead and people would have been hyped on the mystery alone.
I didn’t know “beefed it” was now slang for “screwed it up.” Also, holy shit, this is among Barsanti’s worst, most snarky and awful articles. Which says a lot. “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.”WTF is this shit.
Yeah, what the fuck is “beefed it”? Where the hell did that come from
Maybe it is a combination of autocorrecting “biffed” and lack of copyediting or proofreading?
Until I saw all these comments I assumed that “beefed it” was a well known saying.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know either, I was assuming from context clues. I always knew the word ‘beefed’ as ‘farted, but when described by a frat boy.’
“Beefed it” meaning “screwed up” has been around a while. Adventure Time S03E14 used it, as did a “Rocket Power version of Titantic” meme. IT might be skateboarding slang.
You might want to hit the dismiss button on Syafiqjabar of Mars. He’s a Snyder Cultist who likes to use marginalized people as props to frame Zach Snyder as a white savior…He lives in his own little world…
Or you know, maybe a horror movie without superheroes can still work, like it has worked so many times before. Ask Aquaman director James Wan and WB, they know a few examples. But let us also not ignore this is another instance of a black comic book character getting shafted by WB. And also the ironic humor in this movie being cancelled after Aquaman made a billion dollars with a confirmed sequel but Peacemaker was in production before The Suicide Squad became a box office disappointment with a sequel prospect less likely than Dune.
Saying nothing about the quality of the movies, the circumstances of how those movies were released are so different that it feels like manipulation for you to not acknowledge it. One was released pre-pandemic and the other was released in the middle of the pandemic and was made free to watch for anyone with HBO Max.Also worth noting that HBO Max didn’t even exist when Aquaman came out, so WB didn’t need to produce additional content for subscribers like it does now. Peacemaker isn’t the only DC show being produced right now, they also have Green Lantern, Justice League Dark, GCPD, DC Super Hero High, Strange Adventures.Now that all being said, I did like Aquaman more as a movie.
As an aside, the OP’s a Snyder Cultist who likes to use marginalized people as props to frame Zach Snyder as a white savior…He lives in his own little world…
Wow…lol.
Oh I know about the pandemic. I mentioned elsewhere it’s really unfortunate for the movie since it probably should be more successful. But it’s just ironic how it all pans out. I expected The Suicide Squad to make more money than Dune too considering the brand names involved.
Why are we pretending that a trench movie would have centered on the monsters and been bad? When I heard the title I figured (wrongly) it was a lower budget horror movie where regular folk have to explore the trench for… reasons. Something between the Shallows and the Abyss, maybe with a dash of Aliens. The movie that exists only in my head sounds kinda cool. Moreso than a Black Manta movie at least.
Yeah, I assumed something similar. Maybe regular people having to brave the Trench to find treasure or something. Maybe pirates are involved.
Yeah, a $40-60m James Wan horro movie about sea monsters and pirates sounds way more fun than a $150m Black Manta movie.
Well that all sounds stupid and in no way the ‘fault’ of fans.