James Wan On AQUAMAN: "He's The Wolverine of The Justice League"

James Wan took some time with IGN to talk about Aquaman, and while he couldn't say much, he managed to say a lot. For starters, he more or less emphasized that he was not as involved with Aquaman's presence in Justice League as he could have been and that's more Zack Snyder's vision than his:

"The train on Justice League has kind of set off already! That's basically Zack's vision for that world, but you know, early on, Zack [Snyder] tried to involve me as much as he could and I really appreciated that. It's just that it was very hard for me to solely focus on it, because I was still in the midst of finishing up and shooting Conjuring 2 for Warner Bros. - the same studio! So it's this very interesting world, you know? As much as they wanted me to be involved with Aquaman early on, I was busy making a movie for them. [Laughs] But now that everything is finishing up, I'm definitely getting in there much, much more. And I'm definitely really excited about running with my standalone movie."

Although Snyder will have a good say in our first major look at Aquaman, Wan seems to indicate that nothing is permanent:

"Listen, I'll be honest, in some ways, JL will be an experiment for me to see what works and what may not work as well. And then kind of go, okay... Here’s the great thing, with all these superhero movies, you watch from one movie to another, and they always sort of slightly change things along the way. You kind of have to do that to make what's best for your film."

That's good, as I was really into the fact that Wan was up for making a horror-themed Aquaman, and I was wondering how a whiskey-chugging, wave crashing king of the sea played into that. I can't fault Wan for not taking more time with the character (especially since The Conjuring 2 was so good), and I really like his comparison of Aquaman to Wolverine:

"...he's kind of the Wolverine in some respect. He's the outsider who gets pulled into this world and he kind of doesn't want to belong and he was doing his own thing. And he prided freedom above everything else. That kind of plays nicely into who his character is. He's like a reluctant superhero, right? He's the reluctant king, basically, or would-be king."

Sounds like Wan has the Aquaman I want to see lined up, and I can't wait to see what he does with it. Hopefully Snyder didn't run too much with his version of the character vs. Wan's!