Exclusive: Director James Wan and star Jason Momoa on how the stand-alone film will be very different from 'Justice League'

Aquaman type Movie genre Action Adventure Where to watch Close Streaming Options

And you thought Jason Momoa looked badass in Justice League.

EW’s exclusive first image from the stand-alone Aquaman movie shows Arthur Curry looking somehow even more jacked and more tatted and more menacing than he did before as he strides out of the steam amid some industrial setting:

Image zoom Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.

What’s also interesting is how even this still photo has a rather different feel than images from Justice League, which introduced Aquaman to audiences last month. Director James Wan (Furious 7, The Conjuring) says you can expect many more differences to come. “It’s going to look very different, it will feel very different — aesthetically, tonally, story-wise — it’s my own take,” Wan tells EW. “It’s a much more a traditional action-adventure quest movie.”

Momoa reveals we can expect to see a tale that spans details Curry’s difficult childhood as a half-human, half-Atlantean to eventually becoming king.

“Justice League was only a weekend in Arthur Curry’s life,” Momoa says. “This is a totally different beast. In Aquaman, you see when his parents met and what happened to hem. Then the little boy being raised and finding his powers and going through that and never being accepted on either side. And then becoming this man who puts up all these walls. You just slowly see this man harden up and be completely reluctant wanting to be king and not knowing what to do with these powers he has. I think James Wan just killed it.”

When Wan first met with Warner Bros. to discuss taking on a superhero film, they famously gave him two options: One was a very popular character (The Flash) and the other was considered so impossible to pull off that the prospect of a movie had been a running joke on Entourage. Naturally, the veteran horror director picked the project that would terrify anybody else.

“Aquaman has been the joke of the comic book world, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought how cool that would be,” Wan explains. “Let’s take the character everybody makes fun of and do something really interesting with him.”

Previously, Momoa defended Justice League from the critics and chatted about the second season of his Netflix drama Frontier. Aquaman is released Dec. 21, 2018.

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