‘I collect comics … and I always wanted to play Lobo’
After portraying the King of the Sea as part of Zack Snyder’s DC films from 2016 to 2023, Momoa, 45, has signed up to play the “badass” bounty hunter Lobo in the new DCU, which is being spearheaded by Guardians of the Galaxy filmmaker James Gunn and producer Peter Safran.
“There’s nothing in the galaxy that Lobo loves more than his pet dolphins, a good fight, the ladies and getting drunk in some intergalactic dive bar,” his bio reads in part.
In the comic books, the antihero has “fought on the side of both the good guys and the bad” and squared off against Superman and the Justice League, “and just about every superhero in the DC Universe.”
Momoa captioned his post with, “They called.”
Momoa’s Lobo will be introduced in Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, which is slated to star House of the Dragon actor Milly Alcock in the titular role as Kara Zor-El.
“We’re going to turn that into a big, science-fiction epic film,” Gunn said of the Supergirl movie last year. “Superman is a guy who was sent to Earth and raised by loving parents, whereas Supergirl, in this story, she is a character who is raised on a chunk of Krypton. She watched everybody around her perish in some terrible way. So she’s a much more jaded character.”
After Dwayne Johnson’s attempt to reshape the DC cinematic universe with Black Adam backfired in 2022, Gunn and Safran were named as the new co-heads of DC Studios. In addition to hiring David Corenswet as their new Superman, the pair will cast their own Batman, as well as other notable heroes from the pages of DC Comics.
“I don’t know if my character is ended forever. I don’t see it that way, but there’s one person that’s played Aquaman and that’s me, so we’re not reinventing that one,” he said. “It was an amazing run … I’m excited for what they’re going to be doing, but that was a hard thing to do. Aquaman was the laughing stock of comics in the DC universe. It was a hard thing to take on and make a fan favourite. But it was cool to see brown-skinned children looking up (to me) and thinking that was a really cool thing. I didn’t have that growing up and it was a beautiful feeling to be at the forefront of that.”
Momoa, who was effusive in his praise to Snyder for hiring him to play the underwater hero more than a decade ago, was also open to returning as Aquaman in another Justice League film to square off against the Legion of Doom, which includes Lex Luthor, Black Manta, Brainiac, Riddler, Scarecrow, and other fearsome DC villains.