6. Justice League: Mortal
As any comic book and superhero fan knows, team-up films are all the rage after The Avengers, and all eyes are on DC as they try to compete with Marvel Studios. They seem to be headed in the right direction, with a Superman/Batman team-up film coming in summer 2015, but the studio has been desperately trying to bring their characters together even
before Marvel Studios came along. They nearly brought the Justice League to cinemas only a few years ago, not only casting the entire league but moving forward with building sets for the Fortress of Solitude, Batcave, Atlantis throne room, Themyscara Embassy, and the Hall of Justice. George Miller (the director of the Mad Max trilogy, Babe: Pig in the City, and Happy Feet) was signed on to direct and hoped to film the project in Australia in 2007 for a 2009 release. Early reports suggested that the film would be made using motion capture technology (resembling films like The Polar Express and Beowulf), and the cast included D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Armie Hammer as Batman, Adam Brody as the Flash, Common as the John Stewart Green Lantern, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, Hugh Keays-Byrne as Martian Manhunter, and, surprisingly, Jay Baruchel as the film's main antagonist, Maxwell Lord. The story would have been similar to the animated feature Warner Bros. released in 2012 called Justice League: Doom, which showed Batman's intimate files on all of the League members being infiltrated and used against the JLA by Maxwell Lord. That story is itself an adaptation of the JLA: Tower of Babel comics storyline, and it's possible that parts of the Justice League: Mortal script were scrapped and used for the animated feature instead. Despite Warner Bros.' best intentions with moving forward on the project, it fell apart for two reasons: It was going to be
extremely expensive (Baruchel once estimated that it was going to cost a whopping $300 million) and producers failed to secure a tax credit to film it in Australia. The most puzzling aspect of the film is the fact that WB hoped to tie it into the same continuity as Batman Begins, which was released in 2005, and Superman Returns, which came out a year later. When The Dark Knight was released in 2008, it threw a wrench into the entire production. WB decided to move forward with more solo films (after Miller tried rewriting this film to make it darker, and more Watchmen-esque), which unfortunately led to the release of Green Lantern in 2011. Luckily, DC seems to have bounced back from that and are (albeit slowly) moving forward with laying the foundations for a JLA film.