AceShowbiz - "Aquaman 2" has got an official release date. Warner Bros. Pictures has announced that the DC superhero movie will arrive on December 16, 2022, just in time for the holiday season. This means the studio wants to stick to this pattern for the Jason Momoa-starring film franchise, as the first film was also released around the same time, on December 21, last year.

So far, there's only one other major studio release which has booked that weekend, which is an untitled live-action movie from Disney. The "Aquaman" sequel will likely also face a strong competition from an untitled Illumination Animation movie, which is set for a December 21 release in 2022.

The release date is announced after WB hired David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick to write the screenplay. Johnson-McGoldrick, who also penned the first movie with Will Beall, will once again team up with Beall. Wan is back at the helm, in addition to producing the movie along with Peter Safran.

Johnson-McGoldrick, who previously worked with James Wan on "The Conjuring 2", revealed that he began working on the script for the original movie three years ago after reading the "Aquaman" comic books during filming for the horror.

Jason Momoa is expected to reprise his role as Arthur Curry a.k.a. Aquaman, with Amber Heard returning as Mera. Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Dolph Lundgren will also reprise their respective roles.

The first movie was a commercial success, grossing over $1.1 billion worldwide. It is now the highest-grossing DCEU film as well as the highest-grossing film based on a DC Comics character, surpassing "The Dark Knight Rises".

Capitalizing on the movie's success, WB is making a spin-off, "The Trench", which is focusing on the Trench, the deadly amphibious creatures that attack Aquaman in the 2018 movie. Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald have been hired to write a horror-tinged script for the spin-off, which is being developed with a lower budget than that of "Aquaman".