Justice League: See The Cast From The Cancelled 2008 Film

The cast of DC’s ‘Justice League’ movie has at last been revealed! But don’t get too excited.

We’re talking about the cast of director George Miller’s ‘Justice League: Mortal,’ which came within a hair’s breadth of being made back in 2008.

Photographic evidence of the aborted cast recently surfaced, showing the cast and crew together (sadly with no one in costume), ready to get to work on the big budget blockbuster-in-waiting not long before the plug was pulled by Warner Bros at the last minute.

Stuntman Greg Van Borssum released the previously unseen informal snapshots via blogpage Rust Belt Flicks. The team were in rehearsals in Australia, where production had been scheduled to commence soon thereafter.

The key players pictured above are the almost-Batman Armie Hammer (back) and almost-Superman DJ Cotrona (directly in front of Hammer), whilst the second row from the front features Santiago Cabrera (Aquaman), Adam Brody (The Flash), and Teresa Palmer (Talia al Ghul).

On the front row sits director George Miller with Jay Baruchel (villain Maxwell Lord) and Hugh Keays-Byrne (Martian Manhunter).

In a separate photo alongside Van Borssum himself we see Meagan Gale, who would have been Wonder Woman.

Feels rather like back on the old gameshow ‘Bullseye,’ when Jim Bowen would tell the unfortunate losers, “look at what you could have won…”
However, in this instance did we necessarily lose? I suspect a great many DC fans agree we might very well have dodged a kryptonite-laced bullet on this one.

Armie Hammer spoke about the circumstances that led to the film’s abandonment last year whilst promoting ‘The Lone Ranger’ in Australia:
"You guys had an election and changed your Prime Minister who changed your tax rebate incentive program, and then we had a writer’s strike in the US so we couldn’t change anything in the script and everybody wanted to change things, so… it was a perfect storm."

A reportedly gargantuan budget obviously didn’t help - and while the film was not officially declared dead until 2010, it had hardly been enjoying the most positive buzz among fans to begin with.

Whilst the choice of ‘Mad Max’ director George Miller to helm the project was popular enough, the youth and relative obscurity of the core cast did not go down well; ditto the storyline rumours.

Jay Baruchel told Digital Spy in 2010 that the film “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.”

Now, I can’t speak for everyone, but the words ‘Justice League’ and ‘dark, brutal and gory’ don’t really seem to go together.

Either way, it seems unlikely that whatever ‘Justice League: Mortal’ would have been will wind up making its presence felt when (or should that be if?) Warners/DC finally get a bona fide ‘Justice League’ movie in the works sometime after ‘Batman vs. Superman.’

Could you have seen this team being the Justice League? Are you sad or glad we missed out? Let us know in the comments section below.

Ben Bussey is a freelance writer and comic book movie/sci-fi fantasy/horror enthusiast, who doesn’t particular mourn the loss of ‘Justice League: Mortal,’ and thinks DC really need to step up their game to compete with Marvel.