There are a lot of filmmakers and actors who will happily tell you that three things you should try to avoid working with in Hollywood are children, animals and water. The latter, in particular, has seen many stars come down with various illnesses including pneumonia and hypothermia due to spending hours a day for weeks on end splashing around in a tank, not to mention the inherent drowning hazards.
One person who definitely loves throwing his cast in at the deep end, though, is James Cameron, with the majority of Avatar 2 taking place in or around the oceans of Pandora, completing his underwater trilogy that started with The Abyss and continued with Titanic. Meanwhile, we’ve been hearing rumors for a long time now that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Black Panther 2 could be poised to introduce Atlantis into the mix, with the latest report claiming that a huge amount of Ryan Coogler’s upcoming sequel takes place within the hidden kingdom and thus, underwater.
Of course, we’d advise taking this one with a pinch of salt for now, but with production scheduled to kick off in July, it shouldn’t be too long until the studio reveals some concrete information about what’s going to be a poignant second installment. As per FandomWire’s report, though, the crux of Black Panther 2‘s story will be the introduction of Namor the Sub-Mariner, building to a climactic battle between the Wakandans and Atlanteans.
The elephant in the room is obviously the DCEU’s Aquaman, which became the highest-grossing DC Comics adaptation ever made and comfortably out-earned every entry in the MCU that didn’t star Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, with the notable exception of Black Panther. If the sequel is indeed heading below the depths, then the creative team will need to pull out all of the stops to differentiate it in the eyes of more casual audiences from James Wan’s superficially similar blockbuster.