Although Blue Beetle is next on the upcoming DC movies schedule, when it comes to the DC Extended Universe continuity, there’s only one more entry left: Aquaman 2, a.k.a. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. By the time it arrives as one of the final 2023 new movie releases, it’ll have been five years since Aquaman hit theaters and went on to become the highest-grossing DC movie of all time. However, word’s come in that The Lost Kingdom has been plagued with both reshoot and scheduling problems for a while now, and that’s resulted in some bad news for Batman fans.
You can read through THR’s detailed story about the issues that have made the Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom creative process arguably more complicated than the making of its predecessor, including how there have been three rounds of reshoots and “several uninspired test screenings.” But regarding the Batman update, this is a result of the various scheduling shakeups that movie has went through, as well as a new decree from DC Studios heads James Gunn and Peter Safran. Neither Michael Keaton nor Ben Affleck’s versions of the Caped Crusader will appear in the sequel, as they “do not want to promise a movie universe that will not come to fruition, nor tie it down excessively to past failures,” with one source describing this as “pretty chaotic.”
For those out of the loop, in July 2022, a little over half a year after Aquaman 2 ended principal photography, Jason Momoa revealed that Ben Affleck would reprise Batman, with these two heroes having previously shared screen time in both versions of Justice League. Not long after, it was reported that Keaton had originally been brought back as Bruce Wayne for the next Aquaman movie (remember, he was already set to appear in the now-scrapped Batgirl), but test audiences allegedly found his presence “confusing.” This new THR piece further clarifies that Affleck was brought in as the Batman replacement when The Lost Kingdom was set to open in March 2023, three months before Keaton would appear in The Flash, hence why him spending time with Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry wouldn’t make any sense.
Since then, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom has been moved to December 2023, and until now, it’d been unclear if either version of Batman would be present in it. Evidently they will not, and Gunn and Safran’s reported rationale for that makes sense given that they’re currently putting the new DC Universe together, and that continuity will have its own Batman introduced in The Brave and the Bold. So now we know for sure that The Flash will be the last see of Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck’s versions of Batman. The former was seen dying in battle against Zod and his Kryptonian renegades in that alternate 2013, and after Ezra Miller’s main version of Barry Allen undid those changes to the timeline, he discovered at the end of The Flash that the DCEU’s Bruce Wayne now looked different, with George Clooney reprising the role 26 years after he starred in Batman & Robin.
Batman’s exclusion from this movie also fits with director James Wan having said that Aquaman 2 is a “very standalone film.” So there won’t be any Dark Knight action in this flick, but other members of The Lost Kingdom’s cast include Amber Heard’s Mera, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Black Manta and Patrick Wilson’s Orm, to name just a few. The sequel dives into theaters on December 20, and you can revisit Aquaman ahead of time while going through the DC movies in order with your Max subscription.
