8) Justice League Mortal
Imagine a world in which DC Comics’ Justice League beat Marvel’s The Avengers to the movie theater by three years. It nearly happened. The cast was set, a director was ready, the script was nearly finished, and shooting was only weeks away from beginning. But a combination of Hollywood job action and fretting about the film’s budget killed the project before a single frame could be shot.
Good, fans said at the time. Why trust a marquee name like the Justice League to a bunch of unknown actors and the guy that made Happy Feet? That’s George Miller, by the way. He had signed on to make the film called Justice League Mortal and was very invested in getting the project made in his native Australia. Looking back now, fan reaction was short-sighted, because as the recent Mad Max: Fury Road proved, Miller is a man who knows how to do big- budget action right.
The cast, as it turns out, wasn’t bad either. Armie Hammer (Batman), D.J. Cotrona (Superman), Megan Gale (Wonder Woman), Adam Brody (The Flash), Common (Green Lantern), Santiago Cabrera (Aquaman), and Hugh Keays-Byrne (Martian Manhunter) would have formed the initial League, with Jay Baruchel as the film’s villain, Maxwell Lord.
There were a number of factors in the end that worked against Justice League Mortal. Production on the film got pancaked by the 2007/08 Writers Guild of America strike and the then looming Screen Actors Guild strike. Warner Bros. was also concerned about having competing Batmen on the big screen: Hammer in Justice League and the then filming Dark Knight trilogy starring Christian Bale. But in the end though, it was the Australian government failing to come through with millions in tax credits that completely sank the production.
George Miller said at the time that Justice League Mortal was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Australian film industry and is being frittered away because of very lazy thinking. They’re throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars of investment that the rest of the world is competing for and, much more significantly, highly skilled creative jobs.”
Almost 10 years later, many fans are wondering if he was right.
