With George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road becoming one of the most talked about films of the summer and documentaries such as Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four and The Death of “Superman Lives”: What Happened? in the pipeline, it would only be a matter of time before someone started planning a documentary on Miller’s aborted Justice League film. Director Ryan Unicomb and producers Aaron Cater and Steven Caldwell are those someones, and the Australians are going on Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media to drum up support for the project.
Titled Miller’s Justice League: Mortal, the documentary will cover the 2007 attempt by the director to bring the Justice League to the screen. The film was completely cast–Adam Brody as The Flash, Armie Hammer as Batman, Common as the John Stewart incarnation of Green Lantern, DJ Cotrona as Superman, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, Zoe Kazan as Iris Allen, Jay Baruchel as Maxwell Lord, Teresa Palmer as Talia al Ghul, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, and Hugh Keays-Byrne as Martian Manhunter (the last two appear in Mad Max: Fury Road, by the way). Most of the cast and crew can be seeing in the photo on the top of the page, and each actor paired with the character they were to play is seen above (Images taken from the projects social media pages).
The plot would have been a combination of the “Tower of Babel” story line that ran in JLA, the “Sacrifice” arc that ran in the Superman and Wonder Woman books,with elements of Infinite Crisis and Crisis on Infinite Earths thrown in for good measure. The film would have been big, and ambitious, and even though I didn’t like the stories the screenplay was based on, it now seems to be miles better than what Warners is doing with the project today.
The film got to the point that the cast met in Australia–where the main shooting would be done–for a table read, costume fittings were being done and set construction had started. The film was supposed to hit theaters in 2009, but the plug was pulled on the project at the last minute. There have been anumber of theories of why the rug was pulled out from underneath the film, ranging from the Writer’s Strike of 2007, laws benefiting filmmakers in Australia changing, to Warners not wanting a duplicate version of Superman and Batman apart from the ones appearing on Smallville and the Nolan films.
Unicomb, Cater and Caldwell have stated that the film would not delve too much into the reason why Miller’s Justice League was shelved, but rather celebrate the director’s vision for the project and examine what the film would have done for the film industry in Australia.
The trio are hoping the interest the social media campaign stirs up will be enough to convince Miller and the rest of the principals to lend their support to the project. As it stands, the team has gotten its hands on a number of images from the pre-production stage of the cancelled film, all of which are on display here. The team promises there is more to come if their documentary project comes to fruition.
Typically, these kind of things come with a Kickstarter or a GoFundMe attached to it, but the group is seeking independent funding first. Some investors are reportedly already lined up, but they might be aided by a crowd sourcing measure in the future.
