Before Mad Max: Fury Road and before Zack Snyder got his hands on the DC Universe, action virtuoso George Miller was working on his own Justice League movie. Full disclosure: It sounded fucking awesome. Unfortunately, it never got made. The film was scrapped in 2008 to make way for Snyder's gloomy, slo-mo-heavy version of the DC heroes. At the very least (the very least), details about Miller's Justice League film have trickled out over the years.
Most recently, actor Jay Baruchel, who would've played the villain Maxwell Lord, has revealed a few details about Wonder Woman's role in the film. As he described Wonder Woman's opening scene to the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast:
The first time you see Wonder Woman, the opening scene on Themyscira, it was just her. It's her on top of a steed and she stood about half a kilometer away from a Minotaur. The Minotaur has a battle-ax in his hand and she just rushes him. All the Amazons are there cheering her on, and she just beheads him. Gets off her steed and holds up the Minotaur thing—and doesn't say a goddamned thing. I was like, "That's the Wonder Woman I want to see!" It would have been special.
Yeah, that's right, Wonder Woman (played by Megan Gale, who was also in Mad Max) would have beheaded a goddamn minotaur in her first scene. At some point, Superman was supposed to be brainwashed by Maxwell Lord and Wonder Woman would have been the one to kick his ass:
I turn him into full red-eye Superman, and then there's this big-ass fight between him and Wonder Woman, where he breaks her fucking wrists and shit, and then I die halfway through the movie, and then my consciousness is uploaded into a fucking mainframe and I'm an evil computer.
It sounds totally nuts. They even had a whole cast planned, with D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Armie Hammer as Batman, Adam Brody as Flash, Common as Green Lantern, and Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman.
As Baruchel told Digital Spy a few years ago:
I'll just say this, if we had been able to make the movie that we had gone down [to Australia] to rehearse, if you had seen the production art I'd seen... it would've been the coolest thing ever. It would have been the neatest vision of Batman and the coolest vision of Superman you've ever seen. It would have been dark and fairly brutal and quite gory and just f**king epic ... They had everything there; maquettes, pre-visualisation, absolutely everything and we had assembled this neat cast. The rehearsal process was so strange and so unconventional and, I know it sounds hard to believe, but I assure you it would have been something f**king awesome!
Yeah, it does sound pretty damn cool—especially compared to the Batman v Superman movie Snyder delivered. On the bright side, this year's Wonder Woman turned out to be incredible, along with Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road.
This story originally appeared on Esquire.com.
* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.
