James Wan Reveals the Bloody ‘Aquaman’ Shark Riot Too ‘Weird’ to Leave in the Film

“Aquaman” may feature a boy who can communicate with fish and a mid-movie adventure in the Sahara Desert, but as it turns out, even a movie as bonkers as this has standards. Director James Wan recently revealed to Collider (via The Playlist) that he was directly involved with removing a scene from the “Aquaman” script after he realized it would just be too “out there” to include in the wacky Warner Bros. tentpole.

“[Co-writer Will Beall] had this sequence where Aquaman has been apprehended by King Orm and he’s been thrown into this dungeon,” Wan said. “Like this really awful prison deep in Atlantis. He ends up starting a prison riot, where all the guards are sharks. They were shark-guards, like all shark heads, and he kills one of the shark guards and the shark starts bleeding and then that starts a feeding frenzy among all the other shark guards. It just went nuts. We’re talking like clouds of blood billowing everywhere and he uses that to escape. I was like, ‘Holy crap, I don’t know if I can do that.’”

Wan admitted he was a huge fan of the scene as it was written, but he realized it probably would’ve been just too over-the-top to actually film. “It wasn’t the studio,” Wan explained, “it was me that said, ‘I don’t know if we can have that in there, that’s a bit weird.’ As much as I loved it.”

“Aquaman” is gearing up for release this month with some of the better reviews in the DC Extended Universe, which isn’t saying much considering the critical beatings entries like “Suicide Squad” and “Justice League” got when they opened. IndieWire’s Eric Kohn gave the movie a C grade, writing, “Hobbled by a messy screenplay, paper-thin characters, and a hodgepodge of unimaginative showdowns stretched across bloated running time, ‘Aquaman’ is the latest example of a franchise that keeps chasing its competitor’s tail.”

Warner Bros. opens “Aquaman” nationwide December 21.