Saturday, February 24, 2007

Justice League Of America: Worst Movie Idea Ever

Warner Bros. has taken its first major step to bringing the Justice League of America to the big screen by hiring screenwriters. What a terrible idea. The JLA has always been a popular comic book and virtually every DC hero has been a member at one point or another. But the core group is Superman and Batman and Aquaman and the Flash and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman. The 70s cartoon version was always super hokey and it's impossible to think of a feature film featuring all of them that wouldn't seem ludicrous on eight different levels. Plus, how would the directors behind the next Batman and Superman films feel about seeing their characters thrown into the mix? They couldn't make JLA without Supe and Batman but including them would cheapen the other already active franchises. Plus this derails the obvious franchise of a solo Wonder Woman movie -- which should be a period piece or it'll be ludicrous, by the way. There's only one context in which the JLA makes sense and that's on TV. It's already a de facto thread on "Smallville" and a spin-off of the JLA featuring hot teen/young adult versions of these characters figuring out how to work together and beat the bad guys is low risk and does no real damage to feature film versions. But a movie? "Fantastic Four" was bad enough, wasn't it?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The worst live-actionmovie idea ever, but an animated film of Pixar quality could be quite successful I think.

Michael in New York said...

You're right -- if it was gonna work at all, it would have to be an animated feature. That's the only way we could see all these superheroes coexisting without just giggling.