After director James Wan's Aquaman surfed past the $1 billion mark at the box office, Warner Bros. announced that some of the film's scariest undersea creatures, the Trench, would be swimming off into their own feature film.
While the Trench are relatively minor DC characters, Wan said that development on The Trench is well under way and confirmed that the film will lean into the horrific elements of the creatures and take place in the DC Extended Universe.
"We're still deep in sort of crafting the script, crafting the story right now so I don't want to get into that too much." Wan said to ComicBook. "But definitely it's one that I really want to lean into the horror of it, so it's going to play more as a monster horror movie then it will as a superhero film, but it's still definitely part of the Aquaman world," Wan said.
The Trench debuted at the start of DC's New 52 reboot in 2011's Aquaman #1, by Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis. After their ancestral home was submerged into the darkest depths of the Marianas Tench, they developed new powers and gruesome new appearance. They played a key role in the "Throne of Atlantis" crossover, where they were part of a massive attack on Atlantis, humans and the Justice League.
In one of Aquaman's most harrowing sequences, Jason Momoa's Aquaman and Amber Heard's Mera encounter the monstrous creatures while searching for the Trident of Atlan. However, neither of those characters are expected to appear in The Trench.
While a release date for The Trench has not yet been unveiled, early reports claimed that it could come out "significantly" before Aquaman 2, which is set to hit theaters on Dec. 16, 2022