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Like I mentioned in my full review of Aquaman, James Wan's under-the-sea superhero epic is such a genuinely insane movie from start to finish that I couldn't imagine a set-piece too strange or too complex to fit in. As it turns out, there most definitely was, because of course I couldn't have known that the line for "too much" with James Wan is shark-guard prison riots.

After Collider's exclusive IMAX screening of Aquaman, Steve Weintraub spoke to the director, who explained an absolutely bonkers scene that never made it out of co-writer Will Beall's original script:

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Image via Warner Bros.

“He had a really quirky out-there [sequence]…it wasn’t the studio, it was me that said, 'I don’t know if we can have that in there, that’s a bit weird.' As much as I loved it. He had this sequence where…Aquaman has been apprehended by King Orm and he’s been thrown into this dungeon. Like this really awful prison deep in Atlantis. He ends up starting a prison riot, where all the guards are sharks. They were shark-guards, like all shark head…and he kills one of the shark guards and the shark starts bleeding and then that starts a feeding frenzy among all the other shark guards. It just went nuts. We’re talking like clouds of blood billowing everywhere and he uses that to escape. I was like “Holy crap, I don’t know if I can do that.”

What's interesting about this—besides the shark guards and the underwater prison feeding frenzy, of course—is that even in hearing Wan explain the scene you get a sense of his excitement over Aquaman's world, which really does translate to the finished product.

"I really loved how we weren’t afraid to go there," Wan told Collider. "Just embrace how absurd the world of Aquaman is, and try and have fun with it."

For more on Aquaman, check out the links below:

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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.
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Image via Warner Bros.