Justice League Movie: Lone Ranger Star Could (Still) Play Batman

After being cast as Batman in a scuttled 2007 version of Justice League from filmmaker George Miller, Lone Ranger star Armie Hammer may still be at the top of Warner Brothers's list to play the character in a planned, new film adaptation currently being written by Gangster Squad director Will Beall. Moviehole reported yesterday that they are "Hearing, from a very good source, today that Hammer, who is now a hot commodity after such flicks as The Social Network and Mirror Mirror, not to mention his upcoming lead role in The Lone Ranger, is 'back on WB's radar' for the part of Batman. Not for a solo flick, but for the ensemble Justice League movie [again]." They quote an MTV interview in which Hammer tells a different version of the film's story than has previously been heard--while most reports had suggested the film was never really going to happen, Hammer said they were almost ready to film when the other shoe dropped. "We had gotten a long way into pre-production," said Hammer. "We were about to start shooting when the writer's strike happened at the end of 2007, and then the Australian government denied a 40% tax rebate that they thought they were going to have, so a lot of things just when wrong. "It's unfortunate, because the amount of work that was already done — I mean, they had finished pre-production and they were a couple of days away from starting to shoot, so it's a shame that nobody got to see all of the work that got put into it." Another interesting thing leaked by Moviehole's source is "The Batman in this movie might only be used in Justice League movies," implying that, like last time around, the plan might be to have a Batman franchise and a Justice League franchise going at the same time, with different continuities and different actors in each.