Justice League Movie Gets New Writer

Long before The Avengers assembled to break box office records and wow fans numerous times, Warner Bros was trying to get their own superhero team up movie made.

Famously, director George Miller managed to get the project closest to production; costumes had been made, sets had been built and actors had been cast. However, script problems, and a looming writers strike left the movie dead in the water.

Unsurprisingly Warner Bros are having another crack at the DC adaptation for the big screen. Marvel played a risky and long game; deciding to produce a series of standalone films before the centre piece was no sure thing, but it worked and without the individual movies The Avengers wouldn’t have been as awesomely brilliant. But it still would have been great; it’s Joss Whedon after all.

Screenwriter Will Beall (Castle) has become hot property in Hollywood since he turned in his script for Gangster Squad. The writer has been given the dream job  (well mine at least) and handed both Lethal Weapon and Logan’s Run to reboot. I don’t have huge aspirations to remake either of these movies, but a studio handing you big movies to write, come on!

The path to Justice League hasn’t been a smooth one, Wonder Woman couldn’t even get a TV series off the ground and Green Lantern barely broke even. Christopher Nolan’s Batman saga comes to an end this year, and we already know 2015 will see the Dark Knight rebooted…again.

Meanwhile The Man of Steel is over a year away from flying into cinemas. Will Henry Cavill be playing the Justice League’s Superman? Will it be a different actor? More importantly, do we really need a Justice League movie?

Marvel didn’t have previous incarnations, apart from Hulk (The Hoff’s Nick Fury movie doesn’t count), or rival franchises with the same characters so fresh in peoples minds.

A big part of this decision is character licensing, that is after all the reason Man of Steel and Spider-Man have been remade. If the studio fails to make a movie featuring those characters in a set amount of time, they risk another studio snapping them up or paying huge sums of money to keep the rights to the character.