James Wan

When you’re shooting a big-budget tentpole superhero movie, it’s going to be complicated. When you’re shooting a big-budget tentpole superhero movie, half of which is underwater, it’s going to be really complicated. James Wan’s Aquaman is currently shooting in Australia, and Wan himself says it’s not an easy shoot.

Think you know the epically scary horror series? Test your knowledge with the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies!

Rebecca Thomas has already directed one feature, the 2012 oddball drama Electrick Children. That account of one girl’s imagined immaculate conception via cassette tape (it’s a weird movie) drew positive enough reviews, but failed to make enough of an impact to propel Thomas into the next professional echelon. She regrouped by taking a gig directing a TV show for Netflix, under the impression that the work would be a fine holdover while she plotted her next film — little did she know, Stranger Things would blossom into a full-blown phenomenon and blow open the gates to Hollywood for the filmmaker.

The universe of The Conjuring just keeps expanding outward. James Wan’s ’70s-set creepfest made swimming pools of money for New Line Cinema, which made a greenlighting a sequel pretty much a no-brainer. When that film sold like hotcakes too, New Line moved onto an Annabelle spinoff and a scheduled sequel, a solo project for the demon nun that torments Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, and yet another spinoff for the bowler-sporting Conjuring 2 villain known as The Crooked Man. And now the seventh film in the connected Conjuring world has been announced, promising more highly lucrative scares for New Line.

When the history of this era’s horror movies is written, James Wan deserves his own chapter. Wan has had an enormous influence on the genre for the last decade, as one of the creators of the Saw, Insidious, and Conjuring series. Though he’s branched out his directorial pursuits (he made the tremendous Furious 7 and is now hard at work under the sea on Aquaman), he’s also lending a creative hand on the ongoing universification of The Conjuring, which now has now less than three parallel spinoff series in various stages of production at Warner Bros.

Over the weekend we learned that, for whatever reason, the Resident Evil series is being rebooted to six more films all over again. Much like the protagonist Alice always finds herself waking up and having to fight her way out of the same situation over and over again, so do we once again find ourselves staring down the barrel of another video game franchise. But maybe, just maybe, there’s some hope to be found: horror director James Wan is producing the first of the six movies.

This afternoon, director James Wan shared a new photo of Amber Heard’s Mera in Aquaman, and lo and behold, color has arrived in the DCEU at last, and we saw it, and it was good. Well, hopefully it’s good. Wan has a solid track record, and he proved his blockbuster action chops with Furious 7, but we reserve the right to remain skeptical that this, uh, splash of color (sorry) means that the DCEU will magically become a place where “fun” things happen.

There are a few standouts in the Justice League trailer (aside from Zack Snyder’s glaring obsession with making audiences feel like they’re trapped in a 2001 NuMetal music video): Ezra Miller’s Barry Allen / The Flash, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, and Jason Momoa’s Aquaman — all of whom inject the trailer with enough personality to make up for Ben Affleck’s affectless Batman. Momoa’s humorously gruff take on Aquaman is a pleasant surprise, and it’s really piqued our interest in his upcoming solo film from director James Wan, which has officially begun production.

New Line’s next spinoff from The Conjuring franchise is keeping things in the family — at least on the real-world side of things. Taissa Farmiga, sister of Conjuring star Vera Farmiga, is set to star in The Nun, based on the terrifying ghoul featured in James Wan’s sequel to his blockbuster horror hit. Little is known about the upcoming spinoff, though it seems unlikely that Farmiga’s role will be related to her sister’s fictional take on famous paranormal investigator Lorraine Warren.

Well, it looks like action star Dolph Lundgren is stepping back into the world of DC Comics — this time into a big superhero tentpole. Lundgren has just joined the cast of James Wan’s Aquaman as the dastardly King Nereus.