Doomsday for the Justice League? Tune in Later this Week…

Posted by Josh Radde (josh@filmschoolrejects.com) on January 14, 2008

With the Writer’s Guild strike still in full force, the Justice League movie may be put on hold. IESB.net reports that if no solution is reached this week as to what to do with the script’s re-writes, the production may be scrapped. If that happens, it’s not clear if the production will just be put on hold or cancelled altogether.

Those of us that follow film, work in the industry, or just watch DVD special features know that movie scripts get tweaked daily. Dialogue changes, movements get adjusted, and sometimes scenes get cut at the last minute. Justice League of America was written by Kieran and Michele Mulroney, two WGA strikers who can’t touch pen to paper right now. Director George Miller has his production team setting up shop and, like most directors, wants to tweak the script a little bit. So who can help when the Mulroneys can’t?

One solution offered by IESB is to bring in non-WGA comic book writers to help out. This makes the most sense since these writers will be familiar with the characters and would be able to help out. Where it gets fishy is when you factor in how much this will piss off the WGA.

I don’t really see a problem with bringing in non-WGA writers to tweak scripts. The movie was written before the strike and plans to start production had been set in motion before the strike took full effect. It’s not like these non-WGA writers wrote the script, they’re revising it. It would be like Microsoft Word taking credit for your term paper because it performed a spell-check. This would be bogus if the film gets shut down because of the strike. It’ll put even more people out of a job—those crew members that signed on to do JLA and the actors who are standing by to begin filming. I support the strike, but I can’t get behind this if it leads to more work stoppage.

We should know if Justice League will sink or swim sometime this week.

Talking Point: Do you think they should bring in non-union writers to revise the JLA script?