His films have earned nearly $4 billion at the box office. Can this Aussie director strike gold again?

By Michael Idato

James Wan on set with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II.

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James Wan’s name is synonymous with horror cinema. He directed the razor-sharp Saw and co-executive produced its sequels. He directed The Conjuring and its sequel and produced an assortment of things that go bump in the night, including Annabelle and Lights Out. He’s turned nuns into horror movie poster girls. He’s the reason you’re mortally afraid of dolls, and leave the hallway light on at night.

But in 2015, Wan stepped into the action mainstream with Furious 7, the seventh instalment of the Fast & Furious franchise, which brought in about $US1 billion at the box office. It won him the right to take on DC’s Aquaman, the second chapter of which, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, is released this month. Wan pushed the once-wet superhero out of the comic book sidestream and onto DC’s main stage, alongside Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Oh, and it also brought in about $US1 billion at the box office.

That means Wan’s box office total to date is close to $US4 billion. And while those numbers might put him still a way behind Marvel’s Kevin Feige (at almost $US30 billion) and Star Wars’ Kathleen Kennedy (at around $US13 billion) they do put him in the ballpark of Steven Spielberg and Bond matriarch Barbara Broccoli, whose career-to-date totals sit around the $US5.5 billion mark.

James Wan with a fan at the premiere of Aquaman 2.

“I never really think about the money,” the 46-year-old filmmaker says, when I gesture to an open space near us, and ask him to picture his accumulated box office, stacked in crisp $US100 bills. (There would be about 40 million of them, in case you’re trying to picture it yourself.) “Sure, it’s fun from a bragging rights perspective, but I never let that aspect dictate how I make my movies or what projects I choose to direct. I just don’t,” he says.

What he still has, he adds, is an underdog mentality. “Everything I do, I still feel like I’m struggling to do it,” he says. “A lot of that is that I never grew out of my indie origin. I see myself as the guy who’s trying to break out at Sundance. Even though I’m obviously not making movies at that level any more, that has never left me. And it’s a good thing because it helps to keep me yearning to do something bigger, and better.”

Wan was born in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, raised in Perth, Western Australia, spent his later teenage years in Lake Tuggeranong, Canberra, and his university years in Melbourne. “When I was growing up in Australia, it was strange for me, you’re not quite sure where you’re from in terms of your identity,” Wan says. “I was born in Asia, but I grew up in Australia, all my friends are Australians, I grew up heavily with the Australian culture.”

As a teenager, he struggled to bring it into balance. “But as you get older, you start to realise that you have the best of both worlds,” he says. “And when I was directing the first Aquaman, that theme really resonated with me, Arthur Curry’s character was really that, a guy who wasn’t sure. He’s from the surface world, but he’s also connected to the undersea. He wasn’t quite sure if he belonged but at the end of the day, he realised he’s the best of both worlds.”

The first film Wan recalls seeing in a cinema was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The mathematics of the film’s release date (1937) and Wan’s birthdate (1977) suggest he did not catch its first theatrical run. “The magic of filmmaking definitely wowed me,” Wan says. “I was young, I didn’t know that there was this process behind the making of movies, but that was one that stuck with me.”

James Wan and Jason Momoa while shooting Aquaman 2.

It’s an unsettling juxtaposition: the director of the Saw and The Conjuring movies fell in love with cinema through an animated Disney classic? Reassuringly the anecdote does come with a footnote: the next film he saw, which no doubt had a more enduring impact on his appetite and style as a director was Tobe Hooper’s 1982 masterpiece Poltergeist, which gave us homicidal clown dolls and malevolent spirits in a TV set.

“That made a huge impression on me,” Wan says. “That drew me towards the horror genre in general, and it showed me the power of filmmaking and what it can do and how manipulative filmmaking can be to elicit a kind of emotion, a kind of feeling [from the audience]. And I remember how scared I was of the creepy clown doll. I think that movie had a big part in making me obsessed with creepy dolls.”

Aquaman and Wonder Woman in Super Friends.Credit: Warner Bros Television

Wan delivered the first Aquaman in 2018, the sixth film set in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). Its sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, comes after a main shoot that ran for six months from mid-2021, several post-production reshoots, a substantial restructure for the film’s studio, Warner Bros, which is now Warner Bros Discovery, and the recruitment of filmmaker James Gunn to effectively reboot the studio’s DC Comics assets.

The film also had to contend with shifting release dates – from 2022 to early 2023, and then from early 2023 to the end of 2023 – and uncertain connections to other DC titles, including The Flash and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. The result is that the new film will not, as originally planned, directly reference any other DC titles, nor should we expect major cameos in it. (Scenes with both Ben Affleck’s Batman and Michael Keaton’s Batman were filmed, but later dropped.)

What is clear is that directing isn’t always the glamorous job they sell in the film school brochure. “I always like to point out, look at George Lucas, he directed the first Star Wars in 1977, and he never directed another one again,” Wan says, laughing. “He hated it because it’s such a stressful process. I mean, it’s fun, but it’s also, there are a lot of things that come with it. And I try to look at it spiritually. I try to look at why I wanted to do it in the first place.”

Jason Momoa and James Wan at an Aquaman meet and greet in 2018.Credit: Getty

The final trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was released in September. Superfans immediately put a stopwatch to how much trailer screen time went to Amber Heard’s Mera, the on-screen girlfriend of Momoa’s Aquaman. The answer? A scant two seconds. The significance? Heard had spent much of the preceding two years mired in a messy divorce from actor Johnny Depp, and a subsequent defamation trial in which Heard said her part in the Aquaman sequel had been “significantly reduced”.

To be fair, the second film shifts the story’s focus to the relationship between Aquaman (Momoa) and his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), who must join forces to defeat Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). The story’s exploration of the rivalry between the half-brothers naturally elevates Kidman’s Queen Atlanna, desperate for her two sons to cast aside their bitterness towards each other, to the film’s female lead role.

But it’s a curious lesson in the value of trying to divine a film’s trailer for clues to the film itself. Wan has avoided talking about Heard’s off-screen situation and, when I mention the briefness of her appearance in the film’s final trailer, he does not address her role in the film directly.

“The trailer is a promotional tool, it’s designed to sell the movie, to whet your appetite. The biggest complaint that filmmakers have, directors, is that they give away too much,” Wan says. “With my horror films, I always felt like they give away a lot of the great scares. At the same time, you understand that they have to do that to put bums in seats. If you don’t have something good in your trailer, then chances are there’s probably nothing to pull from. To your point, I think it’s a bit of everything, but ultimately, it’s there to entice you.”

Several cinematic precursors lead us to the world Wan has built around Aquaman. The most obvious is the DC pantheon itself: Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman, which set a gold standard for superhero films that still endures, Zack Snyder’s 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in which Momoa’s Aquaman made his first appearance, and its 2017 follow-up Justice League, which brought Momoa’s Aquaman to the centre of the story.

Jason Momoa as Aquaman and Amber Heard as Mera.Credit: Warner Bros Television

There were earlier attempts to explore the world of Aquaman, notably in animation. The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure in the late 1960s, Aquaman’s prominence in the various Super Friends series of the 1970s, and then a handful of appearances in the 1990s live-action TV series Smallville, played by Alan Ritchson, and a television pilot, starring Justin Hartley, which did not proceed to series but was released via iTunes.

But the world of costume-clad screen heroes also traces its lineage to the high adventure films of director Ray Harryhausen, the man behind 1958’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts. Harryhausen later did the special effects for the 1981 deities and demigods masterpiece Clash of the Titans, which was directed by Desmond Davis.

Those films, despite their sometimes creaky special effects, particularly by the time Clash of the Titans landed in a post-Star Wars world with flying Pegasi, hideous Medusa and the gargantuan Kraken, bestowed a cinematic majesty on otherworldly monsters from the depths of the ocean, and their David-and-Goliath-scale clashes with heroes brave enough to stand against them.

What is more, the casting of film icons such as Laurence Olivier, Ursula Andress and Maggie Smith in Clash of the Titans, particularly, in part inspires the cinematic tradition that turned Marlon Brando into Superman’s father, Jor-El, and Peter O’Toole into Supergirl’s mentor Zaltar in the 1980s, and Kidman into Aquaman’s mother, Queen Atlanna, in both of Wan’s films.

Actor Noel Gugliemi and James Wan attend Universal Pictures’ Furious 7 premiere in 2015.Credit: Getty

“What Ray brought to the industry wasn’t just the tools, but the imagination that went with the stuff that he was doing,” Wan says. “And it’s really part of the magic of cinema, part of the magic of filmmaking, which is how do you bring these larger than life things that are obviously not real, how do you bring them to life? And it takes artists and technicians like him that can actually work it out.”

Filmmaking, Wan says, is not just artistry and politics. “You have to be a technician as well, and the good ones are ones that can combine all of that together to tell the story. And the cool thing with Ray Harryhausen is that for me, he wasn’t just a special effects guy, he was a storyteller. I think that’s the reason why for most people of our generation, we grew up loving all these movies because we got to see, experience, these larger than life stories that until then you only read in comic books.”

As for Aquaman himself, he was created by Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger and made his first print appearance in More Fun Comics #73 in November, 1941. The character, the son of a human lighthouse keeper and the queen of Atlantis, has the earthly name Arthur Curry, but is, in Atlantis, known as Orin. Later, in the 1950s-1960s “silver age” of comic books, Aquaman was a founding member of DC’s Justice League.

James Wan in LA.Credit: Darcy Hemley

In purely cinematic terms, Aquaman’s more popular stablemates Superman and Batman carved off the lion’s share of the big movie action. So exactly how, I ask Wan, does a filmmaker make Aquaman a sexy proposition? (One caveat: I tell Wan he is not permitted to offer actor Jason Momoa, whose sex appeal speaks for itself, as the answer.)

“There’s a reason why an Aquaman story was harder to do back then because ultimately, it’s a very hard, expensive movie to make, right?” Wan says, pointing out the self-evident fact that many of the film’s key sequences take place underwater. “So eventually technology caught up to that, we can now make that work. So that’s a big part of the reason it took a while to get there.”

The other problem, Wan points out, is that “for the longest time, people made fun of Aquaman, right? Thanks to things like [the television series] Super Friends and Family Guy, they really pushed on him.” To be fair, Aquaman was an easy target: his superpower was commanding sea life using “aquatic telepathy” and his variation of Wonder Woman’s iconic “Great Hera!” was “Great Gastropods!”

When he was first brought into Warner Bros to take on the project, Wan was offered a choice of Aquaman or The Flash. He chose Aquaman “because I felt like he was the underdog character. He really resonated with me and I related to him. I loved the idea of taking something that has a certain perception, and then I get to twist it. That’s what made it fun for me and, along with Jason, to try and make him as cool and fun and unique as I can.”

It was also important, Wan adds, to “not be embarrassed by the more goofy aspect of his character and his world that he lives in, but to actually embrace it and wear it as a badge of honour, and try and find a cool version. The idea of a superhero riding a seahorse is kind of lame, but the idea of Jason Momoa riding a sea dragon isn’t, right? So there are ways to kind of skin this cat, and that was part of the challenge, to find a visual, interesting take on that.”

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom lands in cinemas at what could be described as a unique crossroads for the medium itself. The big blue-chip franchises, such as Marvel and Star Wars and even Disney’s animation slate, have hit some hard bumps in the road, both creatively and commercially. Their weakness, though this is an unscientific assessment, might be that what is offered in cinemas is difficult to differentiate from what is offered at home on streaming, creating a consumer inertia that is hitting those slates where it hurts.

At the same time if we look at the four biggest box office hits of the past two years – Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Barbie and Oppenheimer – which took almost $US6.5 billion between them, each delivered clear lessons in scale of production, clarity of story, uniqueness and originality.

Critical to the process, Wan says when I put that to him, is the ability to cut through. “One of the biggest competitions is between the cinema theatrical experience and streaming, and there are other things that we deal with nowadays that previous filmmakers didn’t have to worry about,” Wan says. “They were not competing with Instagram, TikTok, or just the internet in general. There is more competition out there, and you need to be able to cut through the noise.”

Wan’s company Atomic Monster makes content for cinemas, television and streaming. He is, he says, a fan of them all. “[But] when I set up to make my movies, for the ones I direct, I obviously make them with the intention and the aspiration of experiencing them on the biggest screen possible. And when you look at those examples they are truly films that you have to go to the big screen to really experience. That’s how they’re unique. They play larger than life.”

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is in cinemas from December 26.

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