Back on November 16, 2007, I broke the story that this 21 year old “kid” named Armie Hammer had been cast a Justice League movie helmed by George Miller (CLICK HERE for the original BOF report).
And I didn’t want to believe it was true.
Like I said in the original story, it wasn’t because I had anything against Armie Hammer as Batman, or personally for that matter. No, it was that I thought it was a very, Very, VERY bad idea to have two Batmen (Batmans?) on film at the SAME DAMN TIME. Remember, in November of 2007, Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT had just completed filming and was in the midst of post-production. Allegedly, Nolan wasn’t very happy about the two Batmen (Batmans?) on film at the same time either, and let his opinion be known to Warner Bros. (To this day I wonder if THE DARK KNIGHT would’ve been Nolan’s last Batman film if JUSTICE LEAGUE: MORTAL had actually been made.) ANYWAY…
JUSTICE LEAGUE: MORTAL didn’t happen and Nolan went on to a third Batman film — THE DARK KNIGHT RISES — and complete THE DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY?
But what of that other Batman on film, Armie Hammer? Very little is known about this cinematic version of Batman, and we’ve yet to see how Hammer looked in costume as The Dark Knight. However, Hammer talked the most about the project (at least to my knowledge) to date during a Kevin Smith-hosted IMDB panel at the Sundance Film Festival. Here’s a few blurbs…
On his version of the Bat-suit…
“[Peter Jackson’s] Weta [Workshop] built us a whole functioning [Bat]suit that had hydraulics and worked and had microphones all through the suit, so I could hear everything happening around me. It was 100 percent functional because we had $300 million to do it.”
On how it came to an end…
“And then we got a call one day from the producers and they go ‘We need everybody to come in and bring all of your material, bring all of your scripts, bring your notes, bring everything. We were like ‘OK’ and we show up and they had big bins and they go ‘Put it all in here.’ And I was like ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure and I quickly snuck a CD out of my computer and put in my back pocket, turned [all my materials] in and managed to basically steal a script, but other than that, I had nothing to show for it. I’m sure there’s pictures floating around out there somewhere of all of us in our costumes.”
On rushing to put a script together…
“The writers strike was looming…so what we did is we all sat down at a table before we knew it was gonna happen, almost like ‘We have two hours’ and they’re like ‘So just throw every idea we can into the script because we can’t once it starts’ and everybody just sat around spitballing with George and [co-writer] Nico [Lathouris] and the whole creative team down there. We ended up with a script that was almost 200 pages long and then someone goes ‘Ok, five…four…three…alright, guys, that’s the writers strike. Pens down, no one can write anything else and we were alll like ‘Uhhh, what is this script gonna look like?’ but it didn’t matter because we didn’t get to shoot it anyway.”
Interesting. I got to admit that I was already happy that this film never came to fruition, but after hearing this stuff about how the script was being put together, it might’ve been a bigger mess than the JUSTICE LEAGUE we eventually got…well, probably not. – Bill “Jett” Ramey
 to date during a Kevin Smith-hosted IMDB panel at the Sundance Film Festival. ){kind=link}