This is the way the DCEU ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.
Review scores for James Wan’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom are in, and they point to a fairly mediocre reception from critics — a sour, yet expected, send-off to the DC cinematic universe kickstarted in 2013 by Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.
Starring Jason Momoa in the role of the King of Atlantis, the final entry in the DCEU has been met with middling to negative reviews, with a score of 44 on review aggregator site Metacritic based on 25 Critic Reviews, with 26% positive, 55% mixed, and 18% negative reviews.
Giving the film a 7.5 out of 10, Rogert Ebert’s Matt Zoller Seitz writes, “Momoa is the best reason to see the movie. He’s as alpha-cool, even jerk-ish, as a “maverick” action star can be while also making you believe his character is fundamentally decent and knows when he’s gone too far and sincerely feels bad about it. And he’s got range.”
“One minute, Momoa will practically be doing his own smart-alecky running commentary on the film he’s in, and in the next he’ll weep bitter tears or scream out in anguish or vengeful fury over some dastardly action by a bad guy, as if he’s acting in a silent-movie melodrama with title cards,” he continued.
Slash Film’s Rafael Motamayor gives the film a 7 out of 10, writing, “Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom is not just a fun adventure. It also tries to tell an important story about the environment and how we are polluting our planet. Sadly, the film never goes hard enough with this idea, which gets bogged down with the plot and the lore of Atlantis.”
Granting Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom a of score of 6 out of 10, IGN’s Amelia Emberwing wrote, “Sometimes, when a TV pilot doesn’t do its job of grabbing your attention, you’ll hear that you need to watch a few episodes before things get good.
“The first 30 to 45 minutes of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom are the cinematic equivalent of this phenomenon,” Emberwing continued, adding, “Movies sometimes take a little while to get going, sure, but there’s a bit more than story issues going on here.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Amy Nicholson gave the movie a 5 out of 10 in her review . She writes, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, an intermittently daffy and dull sequel, picks up with our hero being bored senseless by his kingly duties. Arthur—his favored name—prefers cage fighting to political negotiations, and audibly groans when he can’t solve a situation with a punch.
Nicholson continues, “He and his wife, Mera (Amber Heard), have spawned an infant son (water birth, obviously), after which Mera disappears from the movie until the screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick summons her, repeatedly, to pop up and save the day. (A patronizing rinse-repeat.)”
ScreenRant’s Molly Freeman gives the film a 2.5 out of 5, declaring, “Despite its thin story and ridiculous moments, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is an enjoyable enough superhero movie. It’s fast-paced enough that I never had time to get bored, but forgettable enough to be considered a throwaway film.”
“Aside from the eye-rolling nature of the unsubtle global warming commentary, the movie is inoffensive fun,” Freeman noted. “If that’s enough reason for audiences to see a movie in theaters, then it won’t disappoint despite Jason Momoa’s schtick.”
Nick Schager from The Daily Beast gave Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom a 4.5 out of 10. He said in his review, “Though its tale involves climate change and ends on a note of tolerance and togetherness, there’s no substance to Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, whose creative bankruptcy is epitomized by a final declaration that dimly rips off Iron Man.”
CNN’s Brian Lowry gives the film a 4 out of 10 in his review, writing, “Indeed, as disappointing DC sequels go, [Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom] gives Wonder Woman 84 a run for its money, although while the villains dragged that 2020 film to its own depths, the absence of a fresh-water foe creates different problems, lacking novel elements to distinguish this movie from its superior predecessor.”
The Wrap’s William Bibbiani gave it a 3.5 out of 10 in his review, declaring, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is a hacked up mess, and that’s not just the editing, but boy is it also the editing. The film tediously recycles the plot of the original, with two characters switching places and another one cut out so haphazardly that it’s genuinely embarrassing and hurts the whole film. Plus it’s an uncleaned fish tank of visual noise, with laughable dialogue and a plot that makes less sense than usual.”
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gave the film a 2 out of 10. In his review he wrote, “I have often enjoyed superhero films with all their surrealism, melodrama and comedy and I actually liked The Marvels with Brie Larson. But there is no doubt about it: where the first Aquaman movie was in enough trouble, with Jason Momoa smirking his way through the story of Aquaman’s undersea travails as if guesting on a lager ad, now we have a terrible sequel, again directed by James Wan, reportedly the final film in the DC Extended Universe.”
He added, “The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.”
The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin gave the film a 2 out of 10 in his review. He wrote, “Some films are so stupid you can swear individual brain cells are dying as you watch them. Then there is Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, during which it felt like entire clumps of grey matter were giving up the gig in disgust and abseiling out of my ears.”
“With mere days to go until the turn of the calendar, here arrives the most numbingly moronic film of 2023: a second solo outing for Jason Momoa’s beefy merman, of the now-disbanded 2010s screen incarnation of DC’s Justice League,” he added.
An even more disappointing critic consensus can be found on Rotten Tomatoes; where the DCEU’s most recent endeavour is officially certified rotten with a 36%.
Toronto Star critic Peter Howell gave it a 1 out of 4 in his review, writing, “Two questions needed answering going into the monumental eyesore that is ‘Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.’ The first: ‘How bad could it be?’ Answer: Extremely bad. The CGI-drenched movie isn’t so much being released as it is being allowed to wash up on shore. There wasn’t even a red-carpet premiere in L.A. for it.”
He added, “The second: ‘How much of Amber Heard has been cut out of it?’ Answer: A lot. She’s been reduced from Jason Momoa’s co-star to cameo status.”
Slant Magazine’s Justin Clark gave the movie a 2 out 4 in his review. He wrote, “James Wan’s Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is a minimum viable product, plopped into the theater with an apathy as pervasive and all-encompassing as the ocean itself.”
He added, “Despite being the successor to a film that got over with fans on the strengths of some big creative swings, Aquaman 2’s job is to simply exist—the last cynical hope of squeezing a few nickels out of the unsalvageable mess that is Warner Bros.’s last decade of superhero movies.”
Newsday’s Rafer Guzmán gives the film a 1.5 out of 4, opening his review with a quote from the movie, “;They say everybody’s good at something. Me? I talk to fish,'” and noting, “That’s the opening joke of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, which — depending on your level of loyalty to Jason Momoa’s title character — will either tickle your funny bone or fall flat as a flounder.
“Somewhere between the earnestly entertaining first film (2018) and this winking-and-mugging sequel, director James Wan seems to have decided that an amphibious superhero with Soundgarden-length hair wasn’t funny enough on his own; he has to crack wise, too,” he added.
Chicago Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper gives the movie a 2 out of 4. He said, “With overused needle drops such as ‘Born to be Wild’ and ‘Spirit in the Sky’ on the soundtrack, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is filled with the usual array of video-game-looking battle sequences while the great-looking cast seems to be going through the motions, as if they’re as exhausted as we are with the DCEU and they know it’s time for everyone to move on and make way for the new DC Studios.”
Associated Press’ Mark Kennedy gives the film a 2.5 out of 4. He wrote, “With rival Marvel at a bit of a crossroads — especially in the wake of its dropping of actor Jonathan Majors — DC, which has suffered its own woes with The Flash, Blue Beetle and Shazam: Fury of the Gods in 2023 — gets a chance to end the year on a high. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom might not be all that but it keeps its trident high even as the sea reclaims its hero.”
BBC’s Nicholas Barber gave the film a 2 out of 5. He writes, “Ten years ago, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel was the first film to be set in a universe shared by DC’s superheroes. The enterprise has had its ups and downs since then, and the last four DC films – Black Adam, Shazam: Fury of the Gods, The Flash and Blue Beetle – were definitely downs.”
He adds, “It’s probably for the best, then, that Warner Bros is now rebooting DC’s cinematic universe, starting with James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy in 2025. But that means that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is officially the final film in the continuity that began back in 2013. It’s the end of an era. And yet it’s unlikely that anyone who sees the film will be shedding a tear.”
ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer gave the movie a 5 out of 10, writing, “Warner Bros. and Jason Momoa have made it pretty clear that no matter what DC does next, Aquaman won’t return. The irony of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom being the anticlimactic conclusion of the DC Extended Universe is that these are the characters and the kind of high-energy adventures I would have wanted to see more of in the future.”
The Messenger’s Jordan Hoffman gives the movie a 6.1 out of 10. He declared, “A has been the butt of jokes for decades, Aquaman’s primary power is that he can converse with watery creatures. With Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, a movie that has suffered several delays, a weirdly salacious lawsuit and represents the fizzled-out final chapter in a ripcorded series, the King of Atlantis ended up in communion with a lame duck.”
The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey gave the film a 1 out of 5. She wrote, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is the latest entry in the rogues’ gallery of brainless franchise films. It is yet another reminder that cinema is locked in a corporate chokehold, robbing artists of the ability even to flail about in style anymore.”
Loughrey added, “Director James Wan had, at one point, confidently set his sights on making a spin-off horror film The Trench (focusing on a mysterious, eldritch rival to Aquaman’s home world, Atlantis) but instead has had to clumsily condense those ideas into background fodder for the franchise’s returning villain, Black Manta.”
The New York Post’s John Oleksinski gives the movie a 1.5 out of 4. He wrote, “By the end of the movie Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, it’s pretty clear that the King of Atlantis is about to become a Filet-O-Fish. Not because Aquaman (Jasom Momoa) dies or anything like that. But you can tell from every second of the sequel just how disinterested DC Studios is in this film and in the future of this character.”
He added, “It must’ve been a real chore for them to finish the choppy follow-up to the popular 2018 original. DC heads Peter Safran and James Gunn are hard at work on revamping the entire stumbling franchise, starting with a shiny new Superman, but first they had to waste precious time finessing the problem-plagued and oh-so-five-years-ago Aquaman 2.”
Just last week, Momoa discussed the fate of the Aquaman franchise, revealing that it was “not looking good” for the King of Atlantis, and that it would ultimately be the audience’s reception to Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom what could potentially help its chances.
“I don’t necessarily want it to be the end… [but] I don’t think it’s really, like, a choice,” Momoa told Entertainment Tonight, noting that DC Studios CEOS James Gunn and Peter Safran want “to start their own new thing up.”
Momoa added, “The truth of it is, I mean, if the audience loves [Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom], then there’s a possibility. But right now, I’m like, ‘It’s not looking too good.’”
The franchise’s future is even in more trouble, as Aquaman and Lost Kingdom was reportedly on track for a disappointed opening weekend — a four-day Christmas weekend, no less —predicting that Warner Bros. and DC’s latest DCEU endeavour would’ve seen it debuting with a disappointing domestic box office of a mere $40 million.
Per Deadline’s Anthonty D’Alessandro and Nancy Tataglione, the film is only set to take in a rough estimate between $75M – $80M internationally, making its debut in 73 markets that even include China, and likely to end up making $110M through Sunday.
To further illustrate, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom‘s production budget is of $205 million, requiring the film to, at the very least, end its theatrical run with final box office of $500 million to break even — something that looks even less likely after seeing the reception it’s had with critics.