Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom has been released and became the unintentional conclusion of the DCEU after many delays and reshoots. The film had apparently undergone some trimming of Amber Heard‘s role in the aftermath of her messy defamation trial with her ex, Johnny Depp. There were also rumblings of bad early test screenings that had sent Warner Bros. into a panic, which drove them to order extensive reshoots. The original cut was rumored to feature cameos, including multiple Batmen, in which star Jason Momoa teased when the movie was in a vastly different incarnation.
One champion of James Wan‘s original cut was Dolph Lundgren — who portrays Nereus, the king of the Atlantean tribe of Xebel, and father to Mera, played by Amber Heard. Lundgren had praised Heard’s on-set behavior and showed great disappointment with their cut-down screentime. According to Variety, Lundgren recently told ComicBook.com, “I just realized that it was some kind of corporate decision that they try to limit Amber Heard and then I’m playing her dad and went along with it. I was just disappointed for the moviegoers, because I thought the original script was great and the original cut — I saw a little bit of it, it was really good. So I didn’t see any reason to start reshooting and reshaping the story, which obviously led to disappointment in the moviegoers and not just me.”
After the trial between Depp and Heard, fans had called for Mera to be either cut or recast. Wan insists that he always intended to shift focus away from Arthur and Mera since this film was more about Arthur and his brother Orm, played by Patrick Wilson. Wan stated, “I always pitched this to everyone from the get-go. The first Aquaman was Arthur and Mera’s journey. The second movie was always going to be Arthur and Orm. So, the first was a romance action-adventure movie, the second one is a bromance action-adventure movie. We’ll leave it at that.”
When the reshoots came into question, Wan had assured fans that it was not out of the ordinary as big films have reshoots all the time. “We have big actors in this movie, and everyone’s schedule is really hard. So, we had to break up our shooting schedule into sections. We’ll shoot a bit here now, because this actor’s available, and then we’ll do another shoot now, because this guy’s available. People are like, ‘Oh, they’re doing a whole bunch of different shoots!’ No. If we actually combined them all together, it’s actually not that many number of days at all.”