What Famous Comic Stories Might Be Used for the 'Justice League' Movies

Titles like The Winter Soldier and Age of Ultron come with Marvel brand recognition. They’re not literal adaptations but cinematic springboards within an established corporate identity. It’s why talk of a Civil War movie makes sense; it’s why Marvel announcing a new Secret Wars book feels smart. These well-known storylines were already on the brain as Warner Bros. rolled outits plan to take the fight directly to Disney’s door with nine newly announced films. After Batmanv Superman: Dawn of Justice, we get -- in order -- Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Justice League 1, The Flash (unrelated to the new hit TV show), Aquaman, Shazam, Justice League 2, Cyborg and a Green Lantern reboot. Could Warners mine any well-known existing DC Universe comic book events for these films? Probably not. Almost all of the most recognizable DC company crossovers deal with alternate worlds merging together. Starting with 1986’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, we’ve seen Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis and Flashpoint, which all deal in varying ways with the merging of branching realities. DC is even running three crossovers right now, all dealing with alternate realities and timelines - Future’s End, Earth 2: World’s End and Multiversity. Most of these events are created to reconcile the long, often-conflicting histories of the 75-year-old DC universe and provide a modern entry point to new readers without a reliance on that history. They smash all possible timelines together and come out the other side with a new unified universe. Would we pay to see a Crisis movie, in which the worlds of Adam West’s Batman, Michael Keaton’s Batman and Christian Bale’s Batman collide with Tom Welling’s Superman, Dean Cain’s Superman and Henry Cavill’s Superman? It sounds unbelievable, and it probably won’t happen in that way. The first episode of CW’s The Flash ended with a tease toward an eventual “crisis” but it’s too early in the life of that show to know what that means. It’s highly unlikely that DC’s TV world and DC’s movie world would ever collide. Lending credence is the casting of Ezra Miller as the Flash for the cinematic universe, while Grant Gustin fills the scarlet speedster’s boots on the small screen. The “Crisis” name means a lot to DC, and I could see them using it in some way for a film title, but not in the world-melding way in which it’s usually intended. One exception is Identity Crisis, a tale of rape and cover-up within the superhero community that would make for a pretty bad time at the movies, to be honest. Lesser known crossovers like Final Night, Our Worlds at War and 52 don’t have the cultural cache of “Crisis” nor a recognizable title like Marvel’s Civil War or Infinity Gauntlet has. DC’s Kingdom Come is closest to that Marvel level of visibility, but it’s associated with the future of these characters, not the present. The chances of these DC films borrowing their titles from the comics just seems unlikely. That doesn’t mean that the comic stories won’t be mined for film. Justice League’s first villain is said to be the living computer Brainiac, and we could see either Geoff Johns or Grant Morrison’s recent takes on the Superman villain as a blueprint for the film. Maybe the underappreciated;90’s crossover “Panic in the Sky,” which sees Brainiac attempt to take over the Earth, has enough DC team-up action to fire up the Justice League screenwriters (whoever they may be). If intergalactic despot Darkseid is the villain in the second Justice League movie, as rumored, then we assume plans are for the sequel to ape the 2010 “New 52” Geoff Johns/Jim Lee Justice League comic arc (recently adapted as the animated film Justice League: War). When the original rumblings about a post-Batmanv Superman JLA movie started, some pointed to Justice League of America #183-185, a 1980 storyline (“Crisis on New Genesis”) that pitted the JLA against Darkseid for the very first time, as a possible inspiration. That storyline is probably still of interest to any screenwriters hired to plot out DC’s films for the next10 years. It would seem that for now, no matter how recognizable the name is, a Crisis on Infinite Earths film is simply out of the question. Even if DC’s characters have been run roughshod in multiple forms over every type of media outside of comics, there’s no feasibility in teaming them all up for one big hurrah. Keep an eye on that “Crisis” naming convention, though. DC sure likes that word. Follow @Gholson Follow @MoviesDotCom