Aquaman 2 recently got shifted to 2023, but it has been a hotly anticipated movie ever since the sequel to the 2018 hit starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard and Patrick Wilson got greenlighted. Oddly, Heard did not get a big bump in her career following the release of her DC film. In fact, she's reportedly set to appear in the second movie in a much smaller capacity, though her agent at WME has admitted the first film should have made her more ‘bankable.’
WME agent Jessica Kovacevic was asked to speak before the movie got shifted as part of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial that played out earlier this year. During the course of events, she noted the actress had not shot to the moon as might have been expected thanks to the DC role, which Heard has portrayed in both James Wan’s Aquaman and the HBO Max version of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which included a Knightmare future with Mera. She said:
Because typically when you have an actor in a movie as successful as that, as Aquaman was, their career total changes… they’re more bankable. With her, that did not happen.
Part of the problem may have been that while critics like CinemaBlend’s own Sean O’Connell were reasonably interested in Aquaman as a movie, a lot of reviews were less excited about Mera. While Refinery 29 called Mera’s relationship with Arthur Curry “fun and quippy” a lot of reviews were less kind to the actress’ scarlet wig and performance. THR even called it “one-note,” among other tepid reviews.
Yet, during the long defamation trial that played out in Virginia earlier this year, Jessica Kovacevic said that given Aquaman had made over a billion dollars, there was an expectation that Heard’s career would jump into overgear. The actress had, in fact, been part of the movie’s success, but her agent said the elephant in the room was the bad press related to what was happening in her personal life, which included tabloid stories about Heard and Depp, the now infamous op-ed and a separate libel trial which reached a verdict in 2020.
No one can say out loud, ‘We’re taking this away from her because of this bad press,’ because it’s nothing she did. It’s all hearsay, and it’s all whatever. But there’s no other reason.
Aquaman 2 has been a big topic in conversation in recent weeks. It came up multiple times during the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp defamation lawsuit, with Heard herself declaring that she’d “fought” really hard to stay in the movie, particularly after details about what Mera was doing in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom came out during the trial.
After Aquaman Ms. Heard allegedly lost an Amazon project she had been up for, though she has landed roles in other projects, including joining the cast of Stephen King series The Stand, which came out in 2019. While the rumor mill for a while even implied she’d been cut from Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, she does have that role coming up, as well as a gig in the Conor Allyn movie In the Fire.
