In 2018, one year after Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry came to the forefront in Justice League, Aquaman was released in theaters (and can currently be streamed with a Max subscription). But what some of you may not know is that the DC movie starring Jason Momoa was one of two possible stories that audiences could have seen. While David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick and Will Beall wrote the movie that was ultimately delivered to the masses, Kurt Johnstad, one of the writers behind the Zack Snyder-helmed Netflix movie Rebel Moon, penned his own Aquaman script. Now Johnstad has opened up to CinemaBlend about this script, including the Westerns it was based on and why director James Wan decided not to use it.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Johnstad in conjunction with the release of Rebel Moon to the Netflix movie schedule, and with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom also now playing in theaters and wrapping up the DC Extended Universe, I inquired about the writer’s past with DC’s King of the Seven Seas. He started off by saying that while he’s never seen Aquaman (which has strictly been a “timing thing”), he loves Jason Momoa and described James Wan as “fantastic.” Johnstad then opened up about how he came aboard Aquaman with these words:
There was kind of a competition, and this happens quite frequently where they hire multiple writers at the same time. So I think it was Will Beall and then myself, and we were two trains who were leaving the station at the same time, and let’s see what script works. I was maybe 30 or 40 pages into that, I’d pitched the studio and was pretty deep into it. Then James was brought on… My treatment was a very different movie. Some of it I hear is in the movie, certainly we had Black Manta as the person [Aquaman] was up against, but my portrayal of Aquaman was much more like Boorman’s Excalibur. He’s got to go find his trident, and it’s a little bit more Outlaw Josey Wales or like The Man With No Name. Very gunslinger, obviously set in the Aquaman world. And so I thought that was super interesting… my script was not going to be as fun and popcorn as the one that came out.
An Excalibur-inspired Aquaman movie was enough to pique my interest, but Kurt Johnstad name-dropping The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Man With No Name really had me wondering what could have been. Both are Clint Eastwood-centric, with the former 1976 movie also being directed by the man who played the title protagonist, and the latter being the actor’s character from the Dollars Trilogy, which consisted of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Furthermore, this would have been a darker take on the Aquaman mythology, which apparently played into why this version of the movie never got made, judging by what Johnstad said next:
So in the middle of my process, James came in, he read my treatment, he said, ‘Hey, this is cool, but I think we should do this, this and this.’ And just tonally they were very different movies, and I was like, ‘Well, I’ve been paid to write this by the studio.’ And there is a little bit of, like, ‘I need to just complete my work, and then I’ll turn in the draft and you can judge it.’ And at that time, basically, probably a month or two into me writing, WB just called me and said, ‘Hey, put pencils down. We’re gonna pause. James is gonna go with his guy.’ That’s just politics, and I want James to be as comfortable and have a person who he can work with. And I think it was one of the writers from The Conjuring who came on and did a draft, and then I think Will came after that.
While Kurt Johnstad could have gone along with James Wan’s suggestions on where to pivot the Aquaman story, he didn’t want to compromise the vision he’s already started putting together. So in the end, Warner Bros. requested that he cease work on the superhero movie, and the more lighthearted script penned by Will Beall and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (who wrote The Conjuring 2 and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It) was greenlit instead. But Johnstad doesn’t hold any ill will towards this creative endeavor turning out the way it did, and he summarized his short stint on Aquaman to me as follows:
So to me, it was just like, I was really Zack [Snyder]’s guy and that’s how I got into the room. I’d made a bunch of movies with Warners. But just tonally, I was writing a very different, darker Aquaman, more mercurial and a little more Man With No Name version. So I never completed the draft, I think I got to maybe page 45 or 50 or something, and they told me to stop writing. And then they said, ‘We’ll call you once the other draft comes in.’ And they never called and they just went in the direction they went.
It sounds like Kurt Johnstad’s version of Aquaman would have made a nice companion piece to Zack Snyder’s Justice League, in that we would have seen Arthur Curry’s mission to find his trident taking some darker turns. Johnstad’s mention of The Man With No Name also has me thinking that Arthur would have embarked on this journey by himself, or at least allies like Mera and Vulko wouldn’t have factored into the story as heavily as they did in the finalized Aquaman movie we got. Although Aquaman earned mixed critical reception, it proved to be a commercial powerhouse, making $1.152 billion worldwide and becoming the highest-grossing DC movie of all time.
Alas, its sequel hasn’t performed nearly as well, with Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom earning tepid reviews and barely making a splash at the box office. With the DCEU now over and the new DC Universe shared continuity getting up to start, it’s unclear what the future holds in store for this character, and there are rumblings that Jason Momoa will shift to playing the antihero Lobo. Meanwhile, Netflix subscribers can see Kurt Johnstad’s work in Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire on the streaming platform now, and Part Two: The Scargiver will follow on April 19, 2024.
