New Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom CinemaCon Trailer Mostly Skips Amber Heard

It’s been an excruciating wait for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom since the shockingly great first movie stole our hearts during the holiday season of 2018. But the end of this tunnel is finally approaching, and director James Wan showed off the first trailer for the upcoming blockbuster at CinemaCon on Tuesday. And it had very little Amber Heard in it.

While Wan wasn’t there in person, he did have a video message for the CinemaCon audience of theater owners and members of the press, saying the second Aquaman movie has everything we loved about the first movie and more, and that it’s “an action-hero story with a really good bromance at its heart.”

That new, budding bromance is between Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), who ruled Atlantis with an iron fist in the first movie before being defeated by Aquaman first in battle and then in single combat.

In the CinemaCon footage, Aquaman is a dad now with a new baby, and he’s also king of the ocean world. But things aren’t the way they should be. “I’m supposed to be a king, bringing the land and sea together. But now, I feel the tide shifting,” Momoa says.

Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is the one responsible for that feeling of unease, as he’s got a new ally and weapon that Aquaman can’t deal with on his own. So he has to team up with his brother, who was the villain in the last movie. Naturally, they don’t get along extremely well–expect a similar dynamic to Loki and Thor, though these two hit a very different vibe than Marvel’s brotherly pairing did.

Notable is that Amber Heard’s Mera is barely in the trailer at all, relegated to only a brief glimpse despite presumably being the mother of Aquaman’s new baby. Heard is coming off a much-publicized defamation trial against her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, which she lost in December.

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is expected in theaters in December.