Image: Megan Gale in her Wonder Woman outfit for the aborted Justice League movie. Photograph by Mark Rogers.
George Miller’s abandoned Justice League movie is one of the weirdest what-if stories of superhero movies. Details have swirled around for years, but now we’ve got a few more courtesy of actor Jay Baruchel, who would have played villain Maxwell Lord in the film, and they’re all about how much arse Wonder Woman would have kicked.
Baruchel revealed the info in the latest Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, dishing on Wonder Woman’s starring role in two major action sequences planned for the movie. According to Baruchel, the first time audiences were going to see Diana in the movie — played by Megan Gale — would be watching her beat the stuffing out of an actual goddamn minotaur:
The first time you see Wonder Woman, the opening scene on Themyscira, it was just her. It’s her on top of a steed and she stood about half a kilometer away from a Minotaur. The Minotaur has a battle-ax in his hand and she just rushes him. All the Amazons are there cheering her on, and she just beheads him. Gets off her steed and holds up the Minotaur thing — and doesn’t say a goddamned thing. I was like, “That’s the Wonder Woman I want to see!” It would have been special.
Later on in the film, Baruchel’s Lord would have brainwashed Superman (played by D.J. Cotrona), leading to another brawl for Diana. We actually saw some concept of that encounter a while ago, but according to Baruchel, the fight sounds like it would have gone less than well in comparison to the minotaur tussle:
I turn him into full red-eye Superman, and then there’s this big-arse fight between him and Wonder Woman, where he breaks her fucking wrists and shit, and then I die halfway through the movie, and then my consciousness is uploaded into a fucking mainframe and I’m an evil computer.
Oh, and then Maxwell Lord gets turned into an evil robot at some point too, apparently. Man, the more we hear about it, the more this movie sounds like it would have been insane.
But hear about it is all we’re going to get at this point, years after the project splintered to pieces. Somehow, it’s probably for the best that we get to just imagine the best version of the madness that would have been Miller’s grand take on DC’s finest in our heads, rather than having something to actually see in action.