Does Warner Bros. have another The Flash on their hands? The last time the production studio was all-in on a DC Studios project from the former era did not end as they hoped. After becoming one of the biggest bombs of the studio’s 100-year history, even performing worse than Green Lantern, they are quite nervous that the next project sticks the landing. While there is little advertising going around for Blue Beetle, which is set to release in only a few weeks, Warner Bros. may once again be too focused on the future.
Their next big hope is the release of James Wan’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which is riding on the potential of the first film’s $1 billion holiday release. The only issue is that the film is seemingly sinking in one way or another. The film has undergone three reshoots by now, which is not something you normally want to hear about a film. One or two reshoots are pretty common nowadays, but the problem seems to stem from the film going through countless test screenings.
During one round, the new Warner film heads, Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, got involved; the latter got involved in the editing process. That led to the film scoring even lower and ended up going through another round of reshoots. Supposedly, the story clarity is an issue for viewers of The Lost Kingdom. Plus, now one can add the fact that the second reshoots including Ben Affleck, who was set to replace Michael Keaton’s character after his originally planned return at the end of The Flash, is now also scrapped by DC heads James Gunn and Peter Safran.
They are pointing to the overworked visual effects houses as one reason, but they have affected many other films ever since the pandemic started. It seems like too many cooks were involved and the film has likely gone even further over its initially planned budget of $205M. So, the film would have to do a lot of heavy lifting to make its money back. Oddly, Black Adam remains the highest earner at the box office for DC since the pandemic started and Dwayne Johnson may have held is promise after all.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
