While back in the 1990s, you could get away with doing a superhero movie without it being a high-stakes enterprise, times have changed immensely. These characters are now considered tentpole properties on their own, and just to add to the pressure, they also need to work as entries in a larger superfranchise. With each passing film, more and more pressure seems to be piled on to the movies to follow.

It’s happened in the MCU as the stakes have gotten bigger and bigger, and it’s happening in the DCEU as their films perform worse and worse. When we last saw a DC film hit the big screen in the form of Justice League, it underperformed so much that it has since added a lot more pressure to Aquaman. But has this added more pressure to director James Wan? Frankly, yes it did, which actually made Wan’s reason for picking the film just that much more ironic:

The irony is, I picked Aquaman because I thought, here’s a superhero I can make that is fully under the radar. No one’s going to [care] about this film. I can just do whatever I want. Make it easy with no pressure. Fast-forward to three years later and now there’s a massive spotlight on it. So, to answer your question, obviously there was a sense of pressure. But I try not to let any of that cloud my vision for the film. I just plow ahead and continue to make the movie I wanted to make.

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Ha. Poor guy. His response certainly makes sense. When he first took on the character, it wasn’t as though anyone was expecting him to do much with it. This was a character who was looked down on pretty consistently by mainstream audiences, so there’s no way there would be any pressure, right?

Oh, how things have changed. Will its performance live up to that newly-acquired pressure? Only time will tell, but reviews at least seem to be working in its favor, right? Hopefully audiences will agree.

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