Justice League Movie: Ten Characters That Could Appear

With the Justice League movie finally semi-officially kicking off its filming next year for a presumptive summer 2015 release (which makes sense–it would otherwise be the first big movie season that Warner Brothers didn’t have a Batman, Harry Potter or Tolkien movie to anchor it in some time), there’s been a lot of speculation as to how, exactly, such a thing would work.After all, without the five movies building to it that the Marvel Cinematic Universe had prior to Marvel’s The Avengers, it seems as though there would be a lot of time spent establishing characters in a film like this. It isn’t the X-Men, where the central premise can be said to revolve around one character (Xavier) and the other characters are just people with powers serving as a means to an end. To do the Justice League in that way would devalue the characters who aren’t “the ringleader,” and even then the question of who truly leads the team is one that fans and comics intellectuals have scrutinized since the ’60s.Everyone’s more or less assuming that the studio will use Zack Snyder’s upcoming Man of Steel as a springboard, allowing him to skip the process of developing Superman as a character in the film. There are a number of ways around Batman, as well, since his origin and general persona are so well-known to fans. The only other character who’s truly essential to the Justice League as far as the outside world are concerned is Wonder Woman, who will be more problematic, although her current (New 52) origin story as the daughter of Zeus gives her roughly the same kind of ease of approachability as Thor had.But who else would appear? Smart money is on Green Lantern and Flash, at least, although it’s hard to say how they would handle Green Lantern. Would he be Hal Jordan? If so, would it be Ryan Reynolds? That would indicate a huge blind spot on DC’s part with regard to how poorly regarded Green Lantern was. It would also miss out on a major opportunity to introduce John Stewart, the most notable non-white human being commonly associated with the League by non-comics readers, whose biggest exposure to the team is Justice League Unlimited. (Sure, you had Hawkgirl, too, but she looks pretty white unless you get into her origin story–and is that really a can of worms you want to open in Justice League?) Going with Stewart, though, would require at least a passing reference to an origin story, whereas using Hal would allow them to fall back on what they’ve already set up with the Green Lantern feature.And, of course, if Justice League is the massive success Warner is no doubt hoping it will be, it might redeem Reynolds’s take on Green Lantern and give the rumored sequel a chance at success.The Flash is more or less a given. His power set is easy to understand, his origin is easy to tell and it would establish the character with the fans so that Warners could finally make the long-rumored movie based on the character, which reportedly has Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim attached to it, or did at some point in its development. Guggenheim’s run on The Flash in the comics may not have been the stuff of comic book legend, but it certainly was miles ahead of what came just before it and received a lot of those “the best he could do with what he had” reviews that good writers often get when they’re assigned to bad comics.Those five aside, things start to get very questionable. Whether the studio would even want more than five characters to headline in a movie where only one of them had been established already is questionable at best, but in case they decided to go with the grander scope of the League, here are our candidates for membership: