"Justice League" May Be Falling Apart. Already. Again.

BadassDigest reports on a persistent industry rumor that Warner Bros. may be hitting the brakes on their "Justice League" movie - which had previously been on a fast-track to get done in time to open alongside "Avengers 2" in 2015 - supposedly on account of Will Beale's screenplay terrible and a big reason why they haven't been able to interest a director yet.


So far, my favorite tertiary gossip to hit in the wake of this is the story that Ben Affleck turned down the job (that part was already widely reported) because Warners' "condition" was that they also wanted him to play the new Batman in the film. Depressingly, I totally buy that - it's clear that Warners has no idea what they're doing on this project, and whether it gets made and fails or dies completely in production people are going to write books about what a colossal fuck-up this has become.

At this point, the future of the DC Movieverse rests solely on the shoulders of Zack Snyder's "Man of Steel." If that film is good and/or becomes a major, major hit and suddenly Superman - THE lynchpin of the DCU and any hopeful JLA movie - is back on the pop-culture "kick-ass" radar; that could be the kind of invigorating game-changer that "Spider-Man" and "Iron Man" were.

Even still, if WB remains this skittish about "League" now I could easily imagine a scenario where they decide to play it safe and revive some version of the Batman/Superman project again ("It's like 'Justice League' but BETTER, because we don't have to worry about those hard-to-explain heroes with weird gimmicks like magic-rings, super-speed or a uterus!") as a kind of warm-up test.