When Zack Snyder was tasked with following Man of Steel with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it fell to the filmmaker to create a shared world that could compete with the MCU... in one movie.
Snyder had been eyed to oversee the entire DCEU slate, though Warner Bros. didn't use Steppenwolf as Suicide Squad's big bad or go with his idea to set Wonder Woman during the Crimean War. Now, it turns out the studio also rejected his take on 2018's Aquaman.
Released at a time when Warner Bros. had decided to move on from Snyder's gritty, R-rated vision for the franchise, Aquaman felt a lot like an MCU movie (for better or worse). It subsequently received largely positive reviews and a massive $1.1 billion at the worldwide box office.
Responding to a fan on Instagram, Snyder revealed that he and Jason Momoa developed a version of Aquaman that was set to reveal Arthur Curry's origin story and how he got his tattoos. From there, he'd have battled the villainous Black Manta.
"Right, so this concept was developed by me and Jason Momoa before the films were made, to honor his Pacific Islander roots. When Arthur's father is killed by Black Manta's father at the end of the first act, Arthur takes his ashes back to his people in the Pacific islands for a ritual cremation. During that grieving ceremony, he receives the tattoos to honor his father's memory."
"Vulko, tasked by his mother to watch over him, provides the Samoan tattoo artist with a special Atlantean needle that can pierce Arthur's dense skin. The tattoos become a permanent inscription of that loss and identity, bridging his Pacific Islander heritage with his Atlantean lineage - and this loss also creates the blood feud between Arthur and Black Manta that drives the larger conflict."
There were scenes with Vulko in Zack Snyder's Justice League that set the stage for this, though those were cut from the theatrical version of the movie when Warner Bros. enlisted James Wan to put his spin on the King of Atlantis.
Some of Snyder's ideas ended up in the final version of Aquaman, albeit in a very different way. We may never know how audiences would have felt about his vision for the DCEU had it played out as planned. However, it seems his idea was for any solo movies to be set in the past, meaning Snyder's Justice League trilogy could tell one big story in the present.
Do you think the filmmaker's take on Aquaman sounds better than the version we watched in theaters?