The Purryburry Production documentary for George Miller's MCU. Rather than giving each hero their own individual film that would lead to the team-up film, Warner Bros. instead intended on starting their film universe with the ensemble that would spin into several franchises. With Miller helming the movie and a full cast ready to go, the studio ultimately pulled the plug on it in 2008.
While Justice League: Mortal never made it to the big screen, various details and looks have come out in the last decade. Australian filmmaker Ryan Unicomb announced in 2015 that he'd be directing a documentary that would go into detail 5 years later get new life when Unicomb recently resumed it as Seven Friends: George Miller's Justice League.
In an interview with Screen Rant, Unicomb was asked about the studio's involvement as he announced the project's revival back in March. When asked if it was easier to pursue the project following 2017's Justice League, "easier" wasn't the term Unicomb would use for what is making Seven Friends possible. Despite having to initially wait for Warner Bros.' word 5 years ago, Unicomb went into detail how the documentary isn't being affected by Warner Bros.
Easier is definitely not the right descriptive word. It's as difficult as ever to get information and for the most part - and this is part of why it's taken so long - it's akin to getting blood from a stone. Because for so many people, it's such a sore point. For producers, it's a sore point because millions of dollars were spent on something that never came to fruition. For some people, it was something that would have made or broken their careers, and they have had to readjust their expectations of what their career was going to be or is. Is Warner Brothers involved in what we're doing in an official standpoint? No. For the most part, it's all based around individual relationships that we've been building over the better part of half a decade. And just being able to clear certain things a day at a time. I will continue to do that; it will continue to be a day at a time thing with different people, never wanted to press the wrong buttons. Some people have got PTSD about a project this big because it's not some unknown character piece they were working on that they just did a couple of drawings for.
It's the Justice League. And it took a long time for them to get to the point where they were ready to make that movie; what Mortal would have been. And it took them a long, long, long time to even get a small amount of the progress again and to actually get it over the line like they did in 2017. And even that was a nightmare unto itself, that specific project. It's like trying to climb a mountain and falling down every time, and then when you finally get to the top, it's an avalanche that just carries you back to the bottom. They finally got a Justice League movie made, and from an audience standpoint, it basically reset everything. It took everything back to the beginning again. For some people, that's a really good thing. For some people, it's not. It's hard to say, "Yes, they're involved," or "No, they're not involved," because it's at this stage, in particular, it's just very muddy water. But the endgame is to obviously have access to the Warner Bros. vault and be allowed to have access to basically anything that we need to be able to show people what it would have been and get respect for the artists and whatnot.
Given that a lot of resources and energy were put into Justice League: Mortal, Unicomb's comments about it being a sore point for several involved is imperative as it includes Warner Bros. What was meant to be the launching point of a shared world of DC films instead had to be scrapped which didn't come without its financial costs. While the DCEU has been going on since 2013, things could have looked incredibly different had Miller's movie made it to cinemas. With that perspective only being one of many factors to have affected the documentary, it justifies Unicomb's approach which is now making Seven Friends possible almost half a decade later. Even with talent such as Hammer who have talked about the scrapped project in various interviews, it's proven that the cancelation affected people that were involved in front and behind the camera.
The film would have starred D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Armie Hammer as Batman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Adam Brody as The Flash, Common as Green Lantern, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, and Hugh Keays-Byrne as Martian Manhunter. Cotrona and Brody did, however, make it into the current DC movie universe in 2019'she 2022 sequel. Seven Friends will feature cast and crew interviews as well as never-before-seen looks from production that includes photographs, production designs as well as video footage. Stay tuned for Screen Rant's full exclusive interview with Unicomb about Seven Friends: George Miller's Justice League.
