I should probably just post the
link to the script without further ado, since most people who come here (assuming
anyone comes here) won't be interested in the ado and will just skip all the ado. But indulge me for just one or two quick ados. I realize it's crazy to spend one's time writing a Justice League Movie as a spec script, so I need to explain to you how and why it happened so you don't think I'm crazy.
I hate most superhero movies. Especially the ones everybody else likes. This drives my eldest brother, who loves all superhero movies, crazy. Over Thanksgiving, I was shooting the poop with him and my other older brother about the prospects of a Justice League Movie. Those morons were all atwitter with excitement. My opinion, of course, was that it couldn't be done. Or rather, that it could be done, but not without sucking.
I gave the usual reasons. Unlike the Marvel heroes, the DC heroes were not all (or mostly all) designed by one man, were never intended to inhabit the same universe, and thus derive from wildly different and mutually inconsistent mythologies and backgrounds that could never co-exist in the same movie. One was an Alien Schoolboy from deep space who got his powers from the sun. One was a Brooding Crusader (in every sense of that word) who mostly worked the slums of DC's version of Chicago. One was an Amazon
formed out of magic clay on a mystical island full of women. One was a Speedster who got his powers when he was hit by a bolt of lightning during a laboratory experiment.
You could get away with one of those back stories in a movie. But trying to build a realistic world with all of them? Impossible. To complicate matters further, audiences already primarily identify these characters with preexisting movie franchises that were not designed with the other franchises in mind. Try to imagine Christopher Nolan's Batman in the same world as Ryan Reynold's Green Lantern. Those worlds weren't built to work together, so combining them structurally, to say nothing of tonally, would be next to impossible.
My argument drove my eldest brother to distraction. Fed up of indulging me in my favorite pastime of peeing all up in his superhero movie cereal, he issued me a direct challenge: "It's easy to pick apart existing movies or make up excuses why an upcoming movie won't work. If you're so smart, why don't you write one? You write movies; write a Justice League movie."
I pointed out all the reasons why such an endeavor, even if possible, would be fruitless. No one hires unknowns to write movies like that. And as a spec script, it would be useless. As the script would feature Warner Bros characters, no one could purchase the script but Warner Bros. And it would have negligible value as a writing sample, since not only would no one hire an unknown writer to write a Justice League movie, no one would hire an unknown writer to write
anything like a Justice League movie.
My eldest bro was unmoved by my excuses. "Whatever. The real reason you're not doing it is because it's easier to criticize something than it is to make something."
I shrugged it off. But I guess his words actually wormed their way into my subconscious, because about a week later, I woke up at 3 AM with the entire plot of a Justice League Movie in my head.
That plot included Hawkman as a reluctant emissary for an invading
Darkseid (sort of the Silver Surfer to his Galactus), Wonder Woman as an
Amazonian brawler who is the unpredictable Hulk-like catalyst of the
piece, a budding love triangle between Wonder Woman, Superman, and Lois
Lane, Green Lantern making a giant construct of himself to hold together
a Daily Planet that's just been cut in half, and various other fun
stuff.
And since it was around Christmas, and I had nothing better to do, I wrote it.
Like to hear it? Here it go:
Justice League: Origins
