The greatest movies never made: George Miller’s ‘Justice League: Mortal’
For a filmmaker who crafted one of the greatest action franchises in history, George Miller has never once returned to the genre outside of the saga that made his name, although he did come agonisingly close before Justice League: Mortal fell to pieces.
The architect behind Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, Fury Road, and Furiosa has displayed a mastery for creating a cacophony of carnage that few directors have ever been able to hold a candle to, but outside of the post-apocalyptic series, Miller has never made a single action movie.
Maybe he’s saving every ounce of his penchant for crafting set pieces most people either couldn’t think of or wouldn’t dare attempt for his signature jaunts to the world of Mad Max. Still, it remains one of cinema’s biggest missed opportunities as he hasn’t been afforded the chance to play in a pyrotechnic sandbox other than the one of his own creation.
Big screen superheroes were in a strange place in the mid-2000s, with the quantity often outweighing the quality after Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man convinced Hollywood that every marketable costumed crimefighter needed a movie of their own, with DC lagging well behind Marvel in terms of output.
Batman had been absent from screens since Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin with Superman nowhere to be seen on the big screen since 1987. But their respective long-awaited returns helped convince Warner Bros that Miller’s Justice League: Mortal wasn’t the utmost priority, even though it was originally announced in February 2007, hot on the heels of both Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and Singer’s Superman Returns.
That September, Miller was confirmed as the director of the $200million epic and wasted no time gathering his ensemble. D.J Cotrona’s ‘Man of Steel’ and Armie Hammer’s ‘Dark Knight’ were to be joined by Megan Gale’s Wonder Woman, Adam Brody’s Flash, Mad Max veteran Hugh Keays-Byrne’s Martian Manhunter, Teresa Palmer’s Talia al Ghul, Common’s Green Lantern, and Jay Baruchel’s villainous Maxwell Lord.
Weta Workshop began work on costumes and pre-visualisation before politics started getting in the way. Earmarked to shoot in Miller’s native Australia, Justice League: Mortal was denied a 40% tax rebate for not hiring enough local performers, leaving the director infuriated. “A one-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Australian film industry is being frittered away because of very lazy thinking,” he railed to the Sydney Morning Herald. “They’re throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars of investment that the rest of the world is competing for, and much more significantly, highly-skilled creative jobs.”
Beyond that, the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike further held up the planned start of production before the release of The Dark Knight hammered another nail into the film’s coffin. Having just struck gold with the first superhero movie to earn a billion dollars at the box office, Warner Bros was wary of having two actors playing Batman at the same time in such proximity to each other. It was a theory that would be rendered ironic a little over a decade later when Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, Robert Pattinson, Michael Keaton, and George Clooney all appeared on-screen as Bruce Wayne between 2012 and 2023.
Eventually, Justice League: Mortal was scrapped altogether, ripping a comic book caper helmed by the Mad Max mastermind away from audiences permanently. It could have been an unmitigated disaster, but the mere prospect of Miller taking on some of the most famous characters in pop culture in the same film and being allowed to paint on a canvas much greater than he’d ever been handed before is more than enough to hold it up as one that got away.
Had it stuck to the intended schedule and gone off without a hitch, it would have arrived in cinemas before either DC’s The Dark Knight or Marvel’s Iron Man, so it’s not out of the question to suggest it could have permanently altered the course of the superhero genre, whether it would have been for better or worse. Unfortunately, nobody got the chance to find out.
