David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick has permission to come aboard Aquaman 2 as the superhero sequel’s screenwriter. Warner Bros. has tapped Johnson-McGoldrick, who co-wrote the first film with Will Beall, to pen the script for the Aquaman sequel, which officially takes its first steps toward development.

Deadline reports that Warner Bros. has hired David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick as the screenwriter for Aquaman 2, signaling the sequel’s first stages of development. Johnson-McGoldrick is a trusted collaborator with Aquaman director James Wan, co-writing Aquaman and penning Wan’s The Conjuring 2.

But there are still a few steps left in this early development process: the studio still has to sign off on the script, as does Wan. While neither Wan nor Beall have confirmed their return, Johnson-McGoldrick’s hiring indicates that Warner Bros. is full steam ahead on the hit comic book movie’s sequel.

While it’s still too early to tell where the plot of Aquaman 2 will go, it’s likely that the sequel will follow up on the arc of Black Manta, whose origin story in the first Aquaman nearly stole the scenes from Orm’s (Patrick Wilson) war against the surface world. During the mid-credits scene of Aquaman, we saw the pirate (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) striking up a partnership with Dr. Stephen Shin (Randall Park), a scientist and conspiracy theorist obsessed with the Atlanteans, to get revenge against Arthur.

It’s no surprise that Warner Bros. is riding the Aquaman wave. The film broke records last month when it raked in $1.085 billion at the box office, nabbing The Dark Knight Rises’ crown for the highest-grossing DC movie ever. Recently, Warner Bros. begun development on an Aquaman spin-off titled The Trench, which would take a horror-focused approach to the best sequence in Wan’s film.

So while it’s still in the early stages of Aquaman 2‘s development, we can probably expect the sequel to surf toward our local theaters in the next few years or so.