The Justice League Movie That Could Have Been…And Might Still Be?
The idea of a Justice League live action movie is the ultimate comic book fanboy’s wet dream. I don’t even care if you are die hard Marvel zombie, if there’s a big screen movie version of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern fighting off aliens or whatnot you know your ass is going to be there in that movie theater, day one. Recently Warner Brothers’ president of production Jeff Robinov, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, let it slip that the studio was indeed planning a big screen version of the Justice League of America for 2013. In a follow up interview, it was revealed that unlike Marvel Studios’ Avengers movie, which as we all know is combining characters from four separate film franchises, Warners was going their own route in how they present the League. The JLA movie would have Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, but they would be totally different versions of those characters than the ones that appeared in Chris Nolan’s Batman series for instance, or the upcoming Zack Snyder directed Man of Steel.
If this all sounds familiar, it is because this all played out before, and not really very long ago either. Back in September of 2007, the Hollywood trades all announced the Justice League movie as being in “aggressive development” with George Miller (the Australian director of the Mad Max Trilogy and Happy Feet) directing. At that time, both Batman Begins and Superman Returns had already come out, and The Dark Knight was already in post production. Both Joss Whedon’s Wonder Woman movie and David Goyer’s Flash movie had been mothballed earlier that year, and with Superman Returns getting less than stellar reception from fanboys, it seemed Warners was going to bite the bullet and put all their eggs in one big super hero basket, and just present all these characters together in a Justice League movie.
At first geekdom seemed pretty jazzed for this. The Justice League is the ultimate comic book film for DC fans after all. In many ways, it is the ultimate comic book film, period. Married screenwriting team Kieran and Michele Mulroney’s script got a lot of buzz, and even made the 2007 “Black List,” a list of the year’s best written scripts as judged by an assortment of industry executives. And George Miller had some geek pedigree with the whole Mad Max thing under his belt. People were genuinely excited.
But then the casting started to happen. Fans had just gotten what many considered to be their perfect live action Bruce Wayne in the form of Christian Bale in Batman Begins, and no matter what you felt about Superman Returns, most fans were cool with Brandon Routh as the new Man of Steel. Well, instead of doing the universe building that Marvel Studios is currently doing, the Warners/DC approach was going to have separate versions of these characters exist at the same time. So no Bale as Batman, no Brandon Routh as Superman. We would be getting different actors in these parts, just when we had accepted these new guys. And the JLA versions, it seemed, were a bunch of nobodies. Kids with names we’d never heard of, like Armie Hammer as Batman. He was 6’5, sure…but he was also only 21 years old. Some guy named DJ Cotrona was cast as Superman. And while Cotrona was 27 at the time…he certainly had a Latino look to him…not quite the white bread Superman we knew. Adam Brody from television’s The OC was cast as the Flash. Suddenly, the dream JLA project was now being branded “Justice League Junior” or worse, “JLA:90210.” Vocal internet fans turned on this baby big time. But despite all the online fanboy bitching, plans were moving ahead for this movie. Production artwork was being done, costumes were being made, and shooting was scheduled to begin in Australia. The cast was sent to physically train for their roles. But then the 2008 WGA Writers Strike happened, and it stopped this movie in its tracks.
It should be noted that angry fanboys everywhere had a secret Gaurdian Angel named Christopher Nolan on their side. See, Mr. Nolan did not want any other guy except his boy Christian playing Batman while he was in the middle of his Bat-trilogy. Batman had just gotten his respect back with Batman Begins, and he didn’t want to risk losing the character’s newly regained cred if this whole thing went sour. Add to that the previously mentioned impending WGA strike, and Warners panicked and pulled the plug on the whole project. Warners said the movie was “on hold” but everyone knew it was pretty much dead. Fans all felt like they dodged a giant bullet, and breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no “Junior Justice League” movie, no “JLA:90210.”
But did we really dodge a bullet? Or could George Miller’s JLA movie been the coolest super hero movie of all time?
What We Know
Only drips and drabs have come out over the last few years on this JLA movie, which we now know got pretty damn far in development. Somewhere in some Warner Brother’s vault there is tons of artwork, photos of costume tests, etc. It is a minor miracle that in this day and age nothing has leaked. The Batman who almost was, Armie Hammer, while doing press for his role as the Winkelvoss twins in The Social Network, talked to Aint It Cool News about just how close they got to filming this puppy:
AICN: I’m fascinated by that stuff, the “almost happened,” the “What if” stuff and just the idea of George Miller doing a JUSTICE LEAGUE movie still… I think it’s going to go down as one of the saddest “This didn’t happen” things ever.
Armie Hammer: And dude I saw it all. Like I saw the prevised fight sequences. I saw the entire storyboarded film that he had in a room ten times the size of this room with storyboards floor to ceiling, so you walked around the entire room and read the movie like a comic book. What he did… He created something that was so magnificent and put so much work into it, the fact that it never got a chance to be seen by daylight or appreciated by those who really would appreciate this more than anything else… I mean he was bringing in the psychology of these characters more than anyone else ever had.
We had psychiatrists with us in our rehearsal process to be like “Why this?” He was like “Well you see, with a delusional character like this, like the Batman, who thinks in this such a way, like a paranoid schizophrenic like this, this would be the motivating factor.” You bring so much more to these characters, because it’s not just “Well in this frame you are going to jump on top of this car and you are going to throw your Batarang.” It’s like “Why is everyone doing what they are doing, but in George Miller’s true style.” He was going so in-depth in this.
We had a brain surgeon, a psychiatrist, a Joseph Campbell expert, and all of these people in every single table meeting we had for a month and a half and then all of the characters were also training as their characters, so The Flash, Adam Brody, was training as The Flash with rubber bands, so he’d be fast and twitchy. Aquaman, Santiago Cabrera, was swimming a lot and Miller would send him to go swim with Dolphins in Northern California for hours so he would be used to being around sea creatures. Batman, being the only human of the Justice League and having to really prove himself there, he had to be the consummate martial artist, as well as the ultimate detective, so he was playing psychological games with all of us.
He would leave me out of things, like intentionally, but I wouldn’t know this until months later when I would just get the feeling of like “What is going on? Why is everybody?” Because he wanted me to constantly be getting into that paranoid mind frame of The Batman.
AICN: Yeah, “you’re not really in the group.”
Armie Hammer: Exactly and he wanted to create that in everybody. For instance, DJ Catrona who was playing Superman; he brought DJ down a month early and showed him the ropes, introduced him to everybody, made him have fun with everybody and all of that, so that when everybody would go down there they would be like “Well what do we do now, DJ?” So they would look up to him like people look up to Superman in The Justice League. It was amazing.
Then last year, the screenwriting duo of Kieran and Michele Mulroney gave an interview to Movieline, and the subject of the Justice League movie came up:
Movieline: Speaking of projects that were almost about to happen, Justice League came this close to shooting, and then…
MICHELE: Pardon me, I need a drink if we’re going to talk about Justice League. [Laughs]
KIERAN: It was a fantastic experience. The movie needs to get made, and it will.
MICHELE: Yeah, we’re not at liberty to discuss too much about Justice League for various reasons, but all I can say is that we had an incredible blast writing it. To get to write for Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman…I mean, it doesn’t get any better. We had a phenomenal time working with George Miller on this.
KIERAN: We ran into the writers strike. A lot of projects that should have been made, didn’t get made. And this was a strike that we fully supported. Things happened, and it’s postponed for the time being. But it’s a great big movie that’s gonna get made.
Have you done any more work on it since the strike?
MICHELE: We haven’t personally done any work on it in a little while, and I don’t think anyone else has. It’s just sitting there in its little cocoon, waiting for the right moment in the superhero canon.
KIERAN: There’s a Batman movie that people are very eagerly anticipating that will get its due. Everything else [the studio is] working on will proceed in a bit. I don’t think the world’s done with superheroes yet.
MICHELE: Look, we work for Warner Brothers all the time…in fact, we’re working on something right now that we’re not even allowed to talk about.( It has since been revealed that project is Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows) We love those guys, they’re awesome. Justice League is all good.
I don’t know, but it sounds to me like they know there is a strong possibility that their JLA script could in fact be revived at some point. Doesn’t sound like the writers are against it, that’s for sure. While I have never received an actual copy of the script, I have read a very long and detailed treatment. And I can say that in many ways, this movie would have been something akin to DC Comics Fanboy porn. While not based on any one comic (really, aside from Watchmen, are they ever?) it was heavily inspired by years of DC Comics lore. We got the origin of the team here, as well as a lot of nods to Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come series (Planet Krypton restaurant makes an appearance even) as well Waid’s JLA story Tower of Babel. For those of you who don’t remember or never read it, Tower of Babel was Waid’s story where Ra’s al Ghul used Batman’s secret protocols on how to defeat the JLA as weapons against them. Also part of this story was Maxwell Lord’s creation of an enhanced army to defeat the super heroes, similar to the comics’ The OMAC Project mini series. In what would have been the movie’s Pièce de résistance , a mind controlled Superman has a giant brawl with the rest of the League. And finally, one of the most seminal moments in DC history, the heroic death of Flash Barry Allen, and his subsequent take over of the role by side-kick Wally West, that was all present here too.
That’s not to say the story is perfect, it isn’t…Batman does one thing that is very out of character for example (which I won’t reveal…just in case) But frankly the ultimate problem with this movie isn’t the script, more that some characters really needed their own movies first. Especially Flash and Green Lantern, two pivotal characters with fairly complicated back stories and mythologies that deserve their own movies prior to this one, if only to introduce to the general audience the concepts behind the characters. Wonder Woman of course should have her own movie too, but that is totally off the table now. I think this past year has proven that Warners doesn’t really get Wonder Woman as a solo property, and her gender makes them terrified of centering a live action franchise around her on the big (or small) screen. As much as it saddens me, that is the way it is. And let’s face it, Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter were never going to get their own movies. I know an Aquaman movie is in development, but it’s not going to happen for a long, long time if ever. To do an Aquaman movie right, it would be Avatar expensive. We’re talking humans fighting/talking etc. in realistic CGI water, and for at least half a movie. And Warners ain’t spending that kind of money on Aquaman, a character who is seen as a joke in pop culture, thanks to the old Super Friends show. It is one thing to have him be a cool supporting character in a movie (where most of his adventures will take place on the surface, or at least the surface of the ocean) but his own movie? Maybe if he’s the break out character in the JLA movie, but that’s a big maybe. And as for J’onn…well, he is strictly JLA supporting cast. Of the “Big 7” of the League, only five can really support their own films at this point. And since one has a vagina, that only really leaves the Flash as the other one.
So could this movie still happen? Eventually, there will probably be a JLA movie of some sort, especially if Avengers does gangbusters at the box office. Warners would look stupid not to attempt it. And If they were to make it in the next few years, they would no longer have to worry about certain issues that halted production in the past. Green Lantern has had his own movie now, so scratch one character off the list who needs to be introduced to the general audience. There is no writer’s strike anymore, and as of next year, Nolan’s Batman trilogy will be done, leaving the character free and clear for use. While the JLA Batman will no doubt still not be in continuity with the Nolan movies (and almost certainly not be Christian Bale either) he probably will be very much like the Nolan version, just in a world with other heroes in it. After destroying the Batman persona with the late 90’s Schumacher movies and so carefully building Batman back up again, they aren’t going to let that happen again by giving us a cheesy, light hearted Batman. And while Zack Snyder has gone on record as saying his Superman would also be in its own universe, I don’t really see a problem here either. Superman is iconic in the way that Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are iconic. More than one person can play the part at a time….no one got confused that Brandon Routh and Tom Welling were both Superman at the same time for example.
Some changes might need to be made to the story, as the Green Lantern in the script was John Stewart. This could possibly remain that way, as Warners isn’t going to want their ultimate super hero team be made up of just white people, and Justice League’s animated series featured John Stewart after all. (Another solution would be to use Cyborg, which might explain why he is being used in the upcoming comic book reboot of the League.) If the Green Lantern movie does really well this summer, then Ryan Reynold’s asking price will go up, and GL’s role is a secondary one to Superman and Batman’s here. They could easily have John Stewart as Hal Jordan’s partner, the guy who patrols the homestead while Jordan’s off on the other side of Sector 2814, leaving an empty spot for him on the team. Of course Green Lantern could only do so-so business, and then Ryan Reynolds would be happy for the JLA gig no doubt. This of course leaves the Flash. The Flash (both Barry Allen and Wally West) have a large role to play in this script, and it would make tons more sense if they were introduced first in their own flick. Plus how shocking would it be to general movie going population if the Flash (a character with his own solo movie first) were to nobly sacrifice himself at the end? Few would see it coming who weren’t hardcore comic book fans.
After the JLA movie never happened, George Miller supposedly went into pre production on a Mad Max sequel/reboot entitled Fury Road. But that also never materialized, leaving me to wonder if Warners plans to resurrect the Miller version of this project in some form soon. George Miller seemingly put a lot of time and effort into this, and I could see him coming back to it under the right circumstances. Certainly no one would laugh at his choice of Batman now, as Armie Hammer just got cast as the Lone Ranger alongside Johnny Depp’s Tonto. From one masked hero to another, and then back again? Could be. It just seems so much work has already been done on this version that totally starting from scratch seems silly.
Of course, What happens with the Justice League movie now entirely depends on how well the Green Lantern movie does this upcoming weekend. If it does huge blockbuster business, then expect an announcement for not only Green Lantern 2 next week, but probably a Justice League movie as well. If it does just decent business, then Warners will probably still proceed with a JLA movie, without giving solo movies first to characters like the Flash. Of course, If it out right flops a la Speed Racer, well….I hope you like Batman and Superman, ’cause they will be the only DC Heroes properties you’ll see on the big screen from now on. So now let’s keep our fingers crossed that doesn’t happen.
