Before he was the sexy shapeshifting wolf Jacob Blake in Twilight, Taylor Lautner got his big break playing a half-human, half-shark.
Lautner starred as Sharkboy in the 2005 movie The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D. The movie is bad. Like, 19 percent on Rotten Tomatoes bad. Still, it’s a cult classic for aughts kids, featuring some campy CGI and George Lopez’s floating head as the villain Mr. Electric.
In the film, Sharkboy must have save the imaginary Planet Drool from Lopez with the help of Lavagirl (Taylor Dooley), who can produce fire and lava.
Sharkboy and Lavagirl is one of those movies twentysomethings adore because they first saw it on bulky TV sets in their childhood basements at 13 years old. So it’s a pleasant (and a bit confusing) surprise to see that Netflix is releasing a sequel, We Can Be Heroes, on January 1st. The film will follow Sharkboy and Lavagirl’s child, Guppy, saving his kidnapped parents from alien invaders.
Notably absent from the new adaptation is Taylor Lautner. J.J. Dashnaw fills in as Sharkboy, bringing a helmet to the finned superhero, which clearly reads as a way to cover up Lautner’s absence. (No word yet on why Lautner’s not in the sequel.)
Still, the biggest twist of all isn’t that the two superheroes got together. They have a kid who’s half-shark and spews lava — this prompts a very serious question.
How did Sharkboy and Lavagirl actually reproduce?
Digging deeper, wouldn’t that kind of volcanic heat render a shark sterile?
The answer is surprisingly not a resounding “no.” Scarier than the realization that we won’t see Lautner’s tight ass in a shark superhero costume is learning some sharks really do live inside active volcanoes.
In 2017, National Geographic ocean engineer Brennan Phillips sent robots into the Kavachi volcano, one of the most active underwater volcanoes on Earth. Two years earlier, they discovered hammerhead and silky sharks swimming around in the Pacific Ocean volcano 20 miles off the coast of the Solomon Islands. This time, they sent robots into the volcano for a documentary on the expedition, which has the awesome name Sharkcano.
Phillips says their robots still detected sharks even though the water inside the underwater volcano was hot, acidic and cloudy. “We saw sharks that in between eruptions are darting in and out between the clouds of the plume,” he told National Geographic. And here I was thinking the only shark swimming around in the deep Pacific ocean was Tony Vlachos in a Survivor swimming competition. (Real heads know.)
That’s about as much information as scientists have gathered. Hopefully, the canonical Sharkboy progeny sparks a new investigation — but feasibly, yes, Sharkboy could send his swimmers into Lavagirl. That’s more shocking than the whole concept of the film, frankly. Sharkboy and Lavagirl are really putting good use to their Planet Drool’s name.
Joseph Longo
Joseph Longo is a culture and entertainment journalist whose work has appeared in The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly and more. He's still trying to understand what it means to be a Gemini Rising.
