After decades as a pop-culture punch line, Aquaman is the reigning king of the DC Extended Universe. James Wan’s supersize aquatic adventure movie has earned more than $1.1 billion (and counting) since its Dec. 21 release, putting the bispecies hero (played by the biracial Jason Momoa) well ahead of DC’s Holy Trinity of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. Before 2018, almost no one would have predicted that Aquaman would emerge as DC’s most popular movie hero.

No one, that is… except James Cameron. Back in the summer of 2006, the filmmaker behind The Terminator franchise helmed an Aquaman movie that earned $116 million in its opening weekend, and kept on swimming to become the highest-grossing movie of all time, topping even his own megahit Titanic. “I thought I did a pretty good job on that,” Cameron tells Yahoo Entertainment, chuckling. “I thought I stuck the landing on that film.” (Watch our video interview above.)

Jason Momoa stars as Aquaman in James Wan’s 2018 blockbuster. (Photo: Jasin Boland/Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection) More

Don’t remember Cameron’s Aquaman? That’s because it only exists in the Entourage extended universe. HBO’s behind-the-scenes-of-Hollywood series cheekily cast Cameron as himself for a recurring Season 2 and Season 3 storyline in which movie star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) scored the title role in the director’s first fictional foray into comic book movies. (Cameron’s first real comic book movie is Alita: Battle Angel, based on the popular Japanese manga. Directed by Robert Rodriguez, the futuristic sci-fi spectacle opens in theaters on Feb. 14.)