10 years ago director George Miller was working on the secret DC superhero team-up film Justice League Mortal. The film was set to break ideals and change the way that we looked at these heroes. The ideas that were applied to the vision of the film were Earth-shaking and would have surprised audiences. There are few details about this cancelled film, but Jay Baruchel took a minute to talk about what could have been an incredible film.
Justice League Mortal had a cast assembled, including Armie Hammer as Batman, D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Common as Green Lantern, Adam Brody as The Flash, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, Teresa Palmer as Talia al Ghul, Jay Baruchel as the villain Maxwell Lord, and Fury Road villain Hugh Keays-Byrne as Martian Manhunter. The project made it through pre-production, development, and even went as far as the cast having full costume fittings.
It was a film that was well on its way to being made, but ran into a few unfortunate events. The writer’s strike was a heavy hit to the production, along with changing currency values, and Australia failing to give the film an essential tax credit needed to stay within budget. These blows killed the film in its early stages.
Actor Jay Baruchel, who was set to play the film’s villain Maxwell Lord, gave up a few new details regarding the cancelled film in an interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast:
“They had all the costume design. They had all of the pre-vis, and 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.”
Baruchel talks about a scene in the script that had For brainwashing Superman and turning him against the rest of the Justice League, a move that causes Lord to bleed from multiple orifices:
“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.”
Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon’s Justice League hits theaters on November 17.
