Marvel Studios made doing a superhero team-up movie seem easy, but as Warner Bros. is finding out, it really, really isn’t.
We’ve already heard Warners is starting to get cold feet and are waiting on the success Man of Steel before moving ahead, and now there’s word they’ve thrown out their current Justice League script because, well, it’s really bad. Reportedly the trashed script featured Darkseid as the big bad guy and was a bit of a shambles due to superheroes being inserted and removed from it constantly (sexy). Oh, and it was written by Will Beall, the guy behind Gangster Squad (32% on RottenTomatoes).
What’s that I hear? Is it the sound of a money dump truck backing up to Christopher Nolan’s front door?
via Badass Digest
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Good. I’ve been hoping this project would die since it was announced.
Take your time, WB. Marvel didn’t build The Avengers in a day.
Easy switch for WB: Make the “villains” the Greek Gods or Titans or whatnot and center it around Wonder Woman, Green Lantern (Stewart or Rayner, don’t care which), Flash (Wally West goddammit, I’m sure Barry Allen will be killed off again by 2015 anyway,) Cyborg, Zatanna, and Nightwing, and hint that something happened to Batman and Superman several years ago. Then the new characters can stand alone and the World’s Finest can be eased into the mythology later–hell, the sequel could center around the search for them.
That could make for a pretty cool movie, but leaving out the two characters audiences would most want to see might not be the best bet to make.
Most of the mainstream DC comic heroes are just not equipped for film. I can’t imagine wanting to see a Flash or Green Lantern movie, the only people worth their salt are Batman and to a lesser extent Superman. Wonder Woman perhaps could be good, but its hard to image her getting done properly by Hollywood. And as far as Batman is concerned, Nolan Bat can’t go in a JLA movie, and I’m not convinced people are ready for a non-Bale batman this early. Maybe in 4 or 5 years. So basically, you could make a Batman Superman tag team movie, with Wonder Woman inter spliced because yeah why not. Also, a sassy gay robot sidekick voiced by Andy Dick. The script basically writes itself.
Few people would have cared about Avengers if it weren’t for the series of films establishing the characters giving us a reason to actually care who Iron Man and Thor are before throwing them into the crazy super-battle. Green Lantern failed, Man of Steel will probably fail, if DC can’t get the movie going public to care about those characters individually they’re going to fare even worse as an ensemble. Meanwhile around the time this JL movie was supposed to show Marvel will be completing Avengers 2 with nearly a decade of character films behind it and a TV series.
Green Lantern failed because it wasn’t that great of a movie and the general public doesn’t recognize GL as much as they do Superman. Man of Steel will do okay because Supes is well know and they will probably stress the fact that Nolan is involved in every trailer.
I’ve always thought that the members of the Avengers all had strengths & weaknesses that compliment one another. Whereas the Justice League kinda feels like a group of god-like forces (and Batman). I struggle to find them very interesting (except Batman, who is awesome).
WB needs clear out the big conference room in their office and payroll Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan to plot out not just one JLA move but a trilogy. No current comic writers know more about great JLA stories than Waid and Morrison. Goyer & Nolan have had their hands on all 3 Christopher Nolan Batman films and Goyer wrote Man of Steel. I have a really hard time believing the process should not be that simple for starting to put this DC movie universe together.
Holy Shit. Do you realize how bad a movie script has to be to get thrown out by the studio? I bet it was just a bunch of unrelated DC comics with all of the characters stapled together with a custom cover sheet.