Believing that they're making the best decisions for the movie, Warner Bros. producer Peter Safran insists, '…if it's James Wan and Jason Momoa, it should be Amber Heard.'
- Jul 31, 2021
AceShowbiz - "Aquaman" producer has responded to a fan campaign to remove Amber Heard from the sequel due to her ongoing legal dispute with Johnny Depp. Despite the online petition gaining 1.8 million signatures and counting, Warner Bros. hasn't budged.
Speaking on "Deadline Hero Nation" podcast, "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom" producer Peter Safran addressed the request to cut Heard from the movie. "I don't think that we're ever going to react to, honestly, pure fan pressure," he said.
Insisting that fan pressure isn't enough reason to make casting change, the filmmaker reasoned, "You gotta do what you feel is best for the movie. We felt that if it's James Wan and Jason Momoa, it should be Amber Heard. That's really what it was."
Safran went on elaborating, "Listen, one is not unaware of what is going on in the Twitter-verse, but that doesn't mean you have to react to it or take it as gospel or accede to their wishes. You have to do what you feel is right for the film, and that's really where we landed on it."
Heard and Depp have been in a long and complicated legal dispute following their split in 2016. Amid their divorce proceedings, the Mera depicter accused her ex-husband of abuse, which the "Django Unchained" star vehemently denied. He then sued her for defamation in 2019 after Heard wrote an op-ed discussing being a public victim of domestic violence.
Depp himself landed in hot water over the abuse accusations and was dropped from "Fantastic Beasts 3" after losing his libel suit against the U.K. against News Group Newspapers (NGN), the company publishing The Sun, which had called him a "wife beater" in an April 2018 article.
"Aquaman 2" kicked off production in late June in London, England with James Wan returning at the helm. Jason Momoa reprises his role as the titular superhero, with Patrick Wilson, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Dolph Lundgren returning in their respective roles. The movie is set for a December 16, 2022 release in the United States.
