Warner Bros and DC have started to rethink the upcoming schedule of movies and just canceled a pair of its planned releases.
After announcing that the Ava DuVernay New Gods movie would no longer be moving forward, The Hollywood Reporter announced that James Wan’s Aquaman horror spinoff The Trench was also canceled.
DC cancels Aquaman spinoff movie
Warner Bros announced that the Aquaman spinoff movie The Trench was one of its legacy development titles it was canceling.
“As part of our DC slate, some legacy development titles including New Gods and The Trench will not be moving forward,” Warner Bros. and DC said in a statement.
“We thank our partners Ava DuVernay, Tom King, James Wan and Peter Safran for their time and collaboration during this process and look forward to our continued partnership with them on other DC stories.”
DC canceling The Trench was slightly surprising since it was a spinoff of Aquaman, a movie that made over $1 billion worldwide in 2018.
What is Aquaman’s The Trench?
In the first movie, Aquaman had to find the trident needed to battle and he went into The Trench to find it.
That was an area of the ocean where former Atlanteans were banished years before and went feral. After Aquaman fought his way through them, he found the trident and his mother and returned to capture his rightful role as King of Atlantis.
James Wan, who made his name in horror, planned The Trench as a horror-tinged movie based in the world of the DCEU.
The one thing that might have held it back was that Aquaman was not going to be in the movie.
Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald had written the script, which Wan was developing as a producer with collaborator Peter Safran.
While Wan will no longer see The Trench come to life, he is still the director of Aquaman 2, which will start to shoot later this year. DuVernay, who lost her New Gods movie, will still be with DC, albeit on the TV side of things, making the show Naomi for The CW.
With both New Gods and The Trench out of the picture, the DCEU is working on its new slate of post-Zack Snyder movies.
These include The Suicide Squad this year, followed by The Batman as a standalone movie in its own universe, The Flash (2022), which should reboot everything in the DCEU using Flashpoint, Black Adam (2022), and Shazam: Fury of the Gods (2023).
Also in development is Blue Beetle, Batgirl, Supergirl, Green Lantern Corps, Static Shock, Zatanna, a third Wonder Woman movie, and a new Superman movie by Ta-Nehisi Coates.