James Wan is a director who has made jumping between vastly different genres look effortless, and the filmmaker has delivered hit after hit along the way. The likes of The Conjuring, Fast 7, and Aquaman are among them, of course, and the latter ended up grossing over $1 billion worldwide when it was released in 2018.
It's no wonder, then, that Warner Bros. acted fast to bring Wan back for both a sequel and spinoff. The Trench was expected to follow those terrifying undersea creatures, though Wan would later confirm that it was secretly set to focus on Black Manta.
Talking to ComicBook.com, the director opened up on the scrapped spinoff and hinted that some of the ideas for it have found their way into Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. "I feel like everything I come up with, everything I do, if I come up with something that I don't end up using, that doesn't mean that I cannot be inspired to use that in a different way," he explained. "That's my problem, is I come up with a lot of ideas and I have so many ideas just percolating, but obviously, I can't use all of them."
"So I would say of all the different thoughts and ideas I've come up with, I end up using maybe 20-30% of them in my work," Wan continued, "and so I do have a drawer full of ideas that could develop into something else."
The Trench is far from the first DC Extended Universe movie to have been scrapped by Warner Bros., and announcing projects that don't become a reality is a recurring issue for the studio. Hopefully, that's going to change in the wake of the recent Discovery merger, but time will tell on that front.
Very little has been revealed about the Aquaman sequel, though some spoilers about Mera's story arc (or lack thereof) have been revealed as a result of Amber Heard's ongoing legal battle with ex-husband Johnny Depp.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is set to be released on March 17, 2023.