Aquaman doesn’t open in the US until December 21st, but it has already landed plenty of praise and a huge opening in China last weekend. It now has the biggest opening for a DC comic book adaptation and for a Warner release in China ($93.6 million) and the fourth-largest opening for a superhero movie there, behind Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Venom.
Perhaps encouraged by the success, Warner has released four more clips from the movie. Previous clips included a dynamic fight scene between Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson, but the new clips let us see Nicole Kidman kick ass and straight up Brick Tamland a dude with a trident. Kidman plays Aquaman’s mom, Queen Atlanna, and the fight clip above shows her protecting her new family. If you didn’t already know not to mess with Nicole Kidman, now you do.
The other three clips show Aquaman and Mera fighting some Trench monsters, Aquaman seeing Atlantis for the first time, and Patrick Wilson’s Ocean Master arguing with Dolph Lundgren’s King Nereus about the need to kill the people on land before they damage the ocean any more.
Ocean Master may be the villain, but at least he has an understandable motivation. The ocean has already lost 2% of its oxygen content due to an approximate 1 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures. Continued temperature rise could trigger another Great Dying, the Earth’s worst mass extinction 252 million years ago which wiped out as much as 96% of ocean species due to oxygen loss (hypoxia). Volcanic eruptions in Siberia gradually raised global temperature more than 10 degrees Celsius, warming the oceans and lessening their capacity to retain oxygen. The oceans lost an estimated 76% of their oxygen, triggering mass deaths. Life on land didn’t fare well either. Up to 80% of all species on Earth went extinct. The massive release of deadly hydrogen sulfide gas by decaying marine animal corpses probably didn’t help.
Maybe Ocean Master is concerned about another cataclysmic hypoxia event, or maybe he just really hates plastic…
(Via the Hollywood Reporter, Comic Book, CBM, Grist, and Reddit)