‘Aquaman’ is the Latest Comic Book Movie with Poor Test Screening Rumors Swirling

My friends over at We Hate Movies have thus far given the best explanation for Aquaman's role in Justice League, and I'm paraphrasing, but he's like a beer commercial that rolls in every so often. Needless to say, the character's overall contributions to the film didn't exactly leave me wanting more, but the Aquaman movie was more or less in the can when JL hit theaters in November. Now the film is having full-on test screenings and while earlier rumors had pointed to the film being a fun James Wan film, the latest rumors point in the opposite direction.

I think that that best we could have hoped for in this situation was that Wan would craft a film in the vein of his flick Furious 7 but underwater and with Jason Momoa and Dolph Lundgren instead of Vin Diesel, The Rock Johnson, Jason Statham, and basically all of vaguely ethnic dudes with muscles. However, Batman-News.com has heard that the film is not testing well of late. Many people jumped on to comment that they had heard the exact opposite from people, and this will go back and forth and on and on until the end of time.

Everything is amped and cranked to the maximum now, so every rumor will be refuted by the next rumor that comes along, and then we'll all forget about it when the next story breaks. I don't want to sound like Andy Rooney or anything, but the comic book movie business doesn't have to be exactly like our political landscape. You don't have to draw a side and defend it, flaws and all, to your dying breath. Don't get me wrong, there's fine people on both sides, on many sides, but DC fanboys and Marvel fanboys don't have to be mutually exclusive categories.

You can prefer one over the other, but don't act like a paranoid quack who thinks that Rotten Tomatoes is deliberately trying to tank your side's films by aggregating the scores of various reviewers and presenting that information to you. I feel like if that sort of toxic thinking were to disappear, the world would be a better place, especially the comic book movie world. Let's all go back to a time when we enjoyed the things that we liked.

I'll give Aquaman the benefit of the doubt because Wonder Woman proved that DC can make a good film without Christopher Nolan, and James Wan is a damn good filmmaker. So think about this whole "test screening score" thing objectively. I'm sure you've been to a test screening before, or you know the type of people that go to these test screenings. Remember that this is their opinion, and keep that information handy the next time you hear a film tested amazingly or awfully. That's your free movie therapy session for the day.