Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom Pitch Meeting

Warning: SPOILERS lie ahead for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom!

As the movie brings a close to the superhero franchise, the latest episode of Screen Rant‘s own Pitch Meeting series has set its sights on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. The DC Extended Universe sequel saw Jason Momoa’s titular hero teaming up with his spiteful half-brother Orm in the hopes of stopping Black Manta from releasing the evil spirit of Kordax and killing Arthur’s family with the use of the Black Trident. Once again helmed by James Wan, the Aquaman sequel has garnered lackluster reviews and a slow start at the box office.

On the heels of the movie’s release, Screen Rant‘s Pitch Meeting heads to Atlantis to reflect on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. The video, as seen at the top of this article, humorously pokes fun at the movie’s attempts to keep the DCEU alive and moving in a unique direction by expanding the lore of the titular character and the underwater kingdom. The episode also mocks the sequel’s clear pulling of story threads from other superhero movies, namely that of Iron Man and Black Panther, with the ending in particular being carbon copies of both.

Aquaman 2 Was Always Doomed To Fail

Though it may have once sat as one of the most anticipated DCEU sequels following the first movie’s mammoth success, there were a lot of factors stacking up against Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom‘s potential success. The development process for the movie was met with a slew of behind-the-scenes hurdles, namely Amber Heard’s widely publicized defamation trial against ex-husband Johnny Depp, which resulted in fan petitions to have her removed from it. Heard further accused Momoa of constantly being drunk on the set of the sequel, which DC representatives quickly debunked.

The biggest hurdle facing the movie was the announcement that the DCEU would be coming to an end following the appointment of James Gunn and Peter Safran as co-CEOs of DC Studios, with plans to softly reboot the entire thing under the DC Universe banner. By essentially confirming that much of the DC properties releasing between then and the DCU’s first movie, Superman: Legacy, wouldn’t be canon to his plans, it effectively killed much interest from audiences to catch the movie in theaters. Aquaman wasn’t the only victim of this, either, as The Flash, Shazam! Fury of the Gods and Blue Beetle all proved to be box office flops for DC.

The Warner Bros.-owned studio isn’t the only comic book studio to be suffering from diminishing returns as 2023 saw the Marvel Cinematic Universe mostly fail to recapture the success of their pre-Avengers: Endgame era, pointing towards superhero fatigue in audiences becoming all too prominent. With Gunn’s Superman reboot set to launch in 2025, the window for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom to release was always going to be a short one, but coming so close to the rest of the studio’s disappointments certainly didn’t help its chances to recapture the first movie’s $1.1 billion success.