Indie Director Darling Jeff Nichols Pitched The World's Most Depressing Aquaman Movie To WB

It's either a rite of passage ... or a war of attrition, depending on how you look at it. If you're an acclaimed filmmaker who has typically made original movies at a mid-sized budget with adult audiences in mind — in other words, exactly the type of movie that has been largely done away with and completely subsumed by the superhero blockbuster craze — then you're inevitably going to be asked about making one of those superhero blockbusters. But every so often, those talented artists actually are interested enough to put some serious thought into their own personal pitch and, in this case, Jeff Nichols might as well have sent those Warner Bros. executives running for the hills.

As we recently saw with the trailer debut for "The Bikeriders," the marketing for Nichols' next buzzy project has finally begun in earnest and that means we're set for the director of well-received movies like "Shotgun Stories," "Take Shelter," "Midnight Special," and more to make the publicity rounds and serve up some choice quotes. He did just that on Josh Horowitz's "Happy Sad Confused" podcast (via The Playlist), where he reminisced about the pretty wild circumstances that led to him actually pitching an "Aquaman" movie to Warner Bros. years ago, which we originally reported on back in 2014. Until now, however, we never heard any specific details about how his take on the superhero who talks to fish would've played out. Well, he made it pretty clear why that collaboration never came to fruition.

To hear Nichols tell it, his approach would've been a little more ... old-fashioned, to say the least.

Don't ask me how but, in the Year of our Lord 2018, a movie centered on the perpetual laughingstock known as Aquaman came out in theaters and made over a billion dollars at the box office. The shockingly huge bounty of profits quickly put plans for a sequel in motion ("Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom" is finally set to arrive in December of this year, presuming there are no more delays) and helped rehabilitate the image of the marine-dwelling superhero, which had begun with Zack Snyder's casting of Jason Momoa for a cameo in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice." Now, if anyone was going to take a darker and more broody approach to the hero, you'd think it would've been Snyder. But not so fast, according to Jeff Nichols.

In his podcast appearance on "Happy Sad Confused," Nichols revealed the particulars of his vision ... which, at the time, WB didn't exactly love:

"I still have scenes from ['Aquaman'] in my head that would've been good. They would've been quite different from the film that was made. It wasn't ever feasible. [...] I liked the older Aquaman, like when he had a harpoon for a hand. He was a fallen king and his son had died. He was in mourning. Obviously, from this brief pitch, you can see it would've sold hundreds of dollars' worth of tickets.

As you can probably tell by such honest and self-deprecating comments, he harbors no ill will towards the studio for ultimately going their separate way. Nichols, of course, previously circled IPs like "Alien Nation" and even "A Quiet Place," which similarly fell through. For now, we'll just have to make do with movies like "The Bikeriders." We're not complaining one bit!