The producers of the planned documentary on George Miller’s aborted superhero adventure Justice League Mortal this week contacted Warner Bros. executives in Burbank to seek permission to use the characters and images.
Producers Kennedy Miller Mitchell advised the filmmakers to reach out to the studio, which owns the rights to the DC Comics characters.
“It’s a nervous wait,” director Ryan Unicomb tells IF. “George Miller and Doug Mitchell know about the project, so now it all hangs on Warner Bros’ involvement.”
Unicomb has already filmed preliminary interviews with comic book artists on the enduring cultural influences of the characters including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Green Lantern, that would have featured in Miller’s movie.
In 2008 Warner Bros. pulled the plug on Justice League Mortal, which the director wanted to shoot in Australia, after the Film Finance Corporation ruled it wasn’t eligible for the then-new 40 per cent producer offset.
Unicomb is working with producers Aaron Cater and Steven Caldwell (with whom he collaborated last year on Gifted, a short he co-directed with Jordan Bailey which followed the rise and fall of the world’s first superhero, Guardian) and writer-producer Maria Lewis.
They say their aim is to “to celebrate the genius of George Miller and the amazing artists who worked tirelessly to bring the production’s vision to fruition, while we also examine the cultural immortality of the Justice League characters across all forms of media.”
If WB gives its approval, Unicomb hopes to interview Miller and Mitchell, US producer Dan Lin, some of the actors who were lined up to star in the film including Armie Hammer (Batman), D.J. Cotrona (Superman) and Megan Gale (Wonder Woman), and concept artists who worked on the project
Crowd-funding site Indiegogo has offered to run a sponsored campaign for the documentary, once the necessary approvals have been given.
Unicomb says, “We want to celebrate where the characters were at that time and look at the new directions that Warner Bros. is taking the characters.”
Warner plans to release Zack Snyder’s Justice League Part One, which will star Henry Cavill as Superman, Ben Affleck as Batman, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Ray Fisher as Cyborg, in November 2017. Part Two is scheduled for June 2019.