While the DCEU continues apace and many different projects are on the menu, it could have been so much different if the late 90’s/early 2000’s projects had come to fruition.
Around that time, a fifth Batman movie (entitled Batman Triumphant) was mooted from director Joel Schumacher, as well as Tim Burton’s Superman Lives which was due to star Nicholas Cage, Kevin Spacey, Christopher Walken and others; and, around 2007, a Justice League movie was on the cards, known as Justice League Mortal, with Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller at the helm.
Already cast in the film were Armie Hammer as Batman, D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Teresa Palmer as Talia al Ghul, Common as Green Lantern, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, Adam Brody as The Flash, Hugh Keays-Byrne as Martian Manhunter and , Jay Baruchel as the villain Maxwell Lord. Sadly, the writer’s strike as well as tax credit issues and other problems, the film fell apart.
With some new info surfacing about the film, star Jay Baruchel has been discussing the film on the Happy Sad Podcast and gave some insight into the production and some of the sequences that would have involved his character. He said:
“They had all the costume design. They had all of the pre-vis. They had all of the sort of production design figured out, and so they would take us and walk us through this command center where they had everything. The aesthetic choices that they were making and the story and character choices they were making are so ballsy, and we won’t ever see it… Imagine Miller doing [Zack] Snyder… it was very tableau … they were paintings. And what the characters were doing had such teeth to it.”
“All of a sudden this guy’s got Superman as a weapon. I turn him into full red eye Superman, and then there’s this big ass fight between him and Wonder Woman, where he breaks her f–king wrists and s–t.
The first time you see Wonder Woman, the opening scene on Themyscira, it was just her. It’s her on top of a steed … and she stood about half a kilometer away from a Minotaur. The Minotaur has a battle-ax in his hand and she just rushes him.
All the Amazons are there cheering her on, and she just beheads him. Gets off her steed … holds up the Minotaur thing and doesn’t say a goddamned thing. It’s like, ‘That’s the Wonder Woman I want to see!’ It would have been special.”
The new Justice League, directed by Zack Snyder with Joss Whedon overseeing reshoots, opens on November 15th. Baruchel’s feature directorial debut, Goon: Last of the Enforcers, opens in the UK on September 8th.
