OK, so it was a busy day as everyone was reporting on their Justice League set reports… we help off ustil they were all in so we could give you the full news round-up.
And here it is.
So what do we know? Well, we already gave you the logo, synopsis and details on it only being one movie earlier (here) but there’s loads of new bits of info all over the web now and we have them all in one easy to access list.
Ain’t we the best?
Ok, so here we go…
VILLAIN:
The villain in the movie will be Steppenwolf, who will be done through motion capture but the actor portraying him is very nearly cast – this confirms it was Steppenwolf in the Communion scene deleted from BvS. He is plannng on invading earth with a horde of Parademons, as witnessed by Batman in the BvS Knightmare scene.
Batman call them flying monkeys during the scene with Commissioner Gordon – more on that later.
WILLEM DaFOE:
Willem Dafoe is playing Vulko, an elder statesman in Aquaman’s home of Atlantis and mentor to the new king of Atlantis.
TIMELINE AND TONE:
According to Zack Snyder’s wife, Producer Deborah Snyder, Justice League is set a few months after BvS.
Bruce Wayne is a changed man after the death of Superman and has a new sense of humanity. She also confirmed Justice League will be more appropriate for younger children than BvS.
Zack Snyder said: “The idea of bringing Superman and Batman into conflict meant that you really had to dig down on the darker parts of them to make them fight each other. This is about uniting the team, and that to me is a fun activity.”
Deborah Snyder added: “The previous two Superman films were a celebration of the darker comics like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and the Death Of Superman.
” Justice League is akin to more traditional comics. It’s definitely lighter. The darkest we’d go is where we’ve been.”
Ben Affleck added: “People trying to accomplish goals together is the root of all great comedy, in my view. There’s definitely some fun in it.”
The first half of the movie will focus on Batman forming the League. He has worked out who Steppenwolf is and what he wants to do. Though we don’t know how yet.
MOTHERBOXES:
There are three Mother Boxes, glimped in the Cyborg introduction in BvS — one possessed by humans, one possessed by Atlanteans, one possessed by Amazonians. This is what Steppenwolf is after as they will let his boss, Darkseid, take over the world and beyond: “Mother boxes are Apokoliptan technology, alien supercomputers, and their story will be told in Justice League, drawing us into the backstories of the various folk we meet in the film. “The old gods came together,” explains producer Charles Roven – indeed Zeus makes a brief appearance in this ancient history – “and decided that, based on an event that happened, these mother boxes would be placed in the care of the Amazonians, mankind and the Atlanteans.”
BRUCE WAYNE MEETS BARRY ALLEN IN COMPLETED SCENE:
The writers saw a completed screen and we have the description as written by Uproxx:
The scene opens with Ezra Miller as Barry Allen entering his dingy, yet decked out with high-tech electronics, apartment. Barry turns on the light and Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne is sitting in a chair. Bruce has a printout of that scene of Barry at the grocery store we see in BvS and wants an explanation. Barry insists it’s not him, but instead it’s “a nice looking Jewish boy who looks a lot like him.” (In the comics, Barry Allen is not Jewish. I later emailed Zack Snyder’s publicist to clarify this and was told that the line about “a nice Jewish boy” was an ad lib by Ezra Miller and Zack Snyder hasn’t “vetted it” one way or another, but added he thinks it’s “interesting.”)
Bruce then notices a Flash costume being built on a mannequin. Now, let’s talk about The Flash’s costume: It’s pretty weird. As a lifelong fan of The Flash, it took me some time to wrap my head around it. It’s not anything like what we see in that “dream sequence,” or whatever that was in BvS, but it also looks nothing like what we’ve seen before — but it’s still very much The Flash. It kind of looks like a sleek Iron Man suit, with individual crimson red metallic parts (148 of them, to be accurate) form-fitting to the body. From the side, the top of the cowl kind of looks like a bicycle helmet. We got an up-close look at the suit during the tour and it’s pretty nuts. It has these weird wires wrapping around the whole suit, which we were later told were electrical coils to trap the electricity The Flash produces when he runs at high speeds.
Back to the scene: Bruce asks Barry about the costume. Barry tells Bruce he’s a competitive ice dancer. Bruce then points out that the material used to make the suit is the same material NASA uses to prevent burn up during reentry. Barry quips, “Very competitive ice dancing.”
Bruce, having enough of this nonsense, hurls a batarang at Barry. Then the action hits slow motion, other than Barry. (It’s similar to the effect we see with Quicksilver in the last two X-Men movies.) Barry easily moves out of the way of the batarang, then grabs it out of the air, then asks Bruce, “You’re the Batman?”
The big laugh happens when Bruce starts his pitch for Barry to join his new team. He barely gets through telling Barry that he has reason to believe there will soon be an alien invasion before Barry says, “Stop right there, I’m in.” Bruce looks surprised it was that easy and Barry says, “I need friends,” before asking Bruce if he could keep the batarang.
Man, we love the sound of this scene!
GCPD ROOFTOP SCENE IS AWESOME SOUNDING! ALSO NEW BAT-VEHICLES:
The bloggers were on set on day 31 of filming (June 17th, 2016) and it was JK Simmons first day of filming.
They saw a scene being filmed that had Batman (Ben Affleck), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and Commissioner Gordon (JK Simmons). According to Collider Simmons has a wig and looks like the definitive take on Gordon.
Seriously, to see him standing by the Batsignal, talking to Batman and the rest of the League… we’re in nerd-heaven!
Anyway, the scene…
Gordon turns on the signal and Batman, Flash and Wonder Woman all arrive and they tell Gordon about the Parademons – this is where Batman calls them flying monkeys. They also talk about eight missing scientists in Metropolis. When Cyborg turns up he informs them another scientist has been taken, this time from STAR (squee!) Labs. He also wants to join the team, from what we’re hearing Wonder Woman is happy here as she must have tried to recruit him earlier.
Other things gleamed s that there’s an old abandoned tunned connecting Gotham and Metropolis and Batman uses a vehicle called the crawler to go back and forth – at some stage there’s a massive battle involving this vehicle and a load of Parademons.
The Crawler (Knightcrawler) has four enormous steel legs and was built by the military in the 1960s. It stomps about causing untold damage, with a flamethrower on the front and hooks on its limbs that grab onto surfaces, shoving it along: “It’s robust, it can travel in places you can’t really access,” says designer Patrick Tatopoulos to Empire. “Places where cars and planes won’t work. It’s like a crab thing.”
Also, there were images displayed of Alfred in overalls building new Bat-gadgets. On of which is a jet described as a flying Batmobile and called the Flying Fox. Oh and concept art showed Alfred flying it…
At the end of the scene, Commissioner Gordon turns to find everyone except Flash gone (nice nod to the comics here). Flash looks at him and says: “Wow, they just left like that, didn’t they? That’s rude.” Classic.
We’re hearing a lot of postive things about Flash, with some comparing his humour and attiutude to Spider-man in Captain America: Civil War.
BATMAN WILL HAVE MORE THAN ONE SUIT AGAIN AND WHAT ABOUT THE FLASH COSTUME?
Does Batman have two suits like in BvS? costume designer Michael Wilkinsonsays he does indeed. His regular suit will be more armoured and have more pronounced muscles but he will also have a Tactical Suit towards the end of the movie… with glowing white eyes again (yes!): “In the final chapter of our film, Batman realises he has to step up his game and he and Alfred have been developing a suit that’s even more protective. There is external armour plating, strapped over a layer of leather, and some stylish goggles which, above and beyond practical usage, serve to catch the light and give his eyes a flash of white because, well, it looks cool.” Yes, yes it does…
What about the Flash suit? We know it was seen on the tour (and the filmed scene). Wilkinson described it as a work in progress as Barry Allen is building it himself.
It has 148 separate parts including many wires: “He’s discovering his powers, he’s testing things. Some things work, some things don’t. It’s designed to protect him as he moves incredibly fast through space. We studied aerodynamics and vehicle design. There are materials that are great in high temperatures, that deflect electricity, because when he moves really fast he is able to generate electricity. He’s like an electrical coil. There will be a digital effect where these wires flash and circle his body and he can really create a lot of energy.”
All reports are saying that despite the armour look, it’s definitely The Flash’s suit and doesn’t look like the suit glimpsed in BvS which is clearly a future battle suit for Barry.
BEN AFFLECK TALKS ABOUT THE NEW OUTLOOK OF BRUCE WAYNE, GEOFF JOHNS AND THE SOLO BATMAN MOVIE:
Ben Affleck revealed some details about Batman in the new movie and how he has changed after BvS: “He’s on a mission to get this group together … Is a guy who basically broods in a cave all day really the best person to put together a team of superheroes? He doesn’t have huge success initially, he may have rubbed some others the wrong way.
“He’s no longer extreme in that [cynical] way … He wants to make the world better.”
He reaffirms that Geoff Johns is now a big part of the movie’s creation as Chief Creative Officer: “Geoff is a big part of things … Geoff is a brilliant guy and there’s no one I know who knows more about comic books. He’s got a great pace and he’s super nice.”
Snyder too, spoke about Johns’ encyclopedic kowledge of DC comics: “Geoff and I have had a great working relationship … his knowledge of comics is crazy. He’s an encyclopedia of comics. I’ll be like, ‘Hey, is there a weird Lantern from whatever?” And he’ll be like, “You know…” He’s really amazing keeping everything in canon that I’d be, ‘I’ve never heard of that.’”
What influences are there at play in his Batman Standalone script? “This has other influences that I don’t want to name, because then it will give away story elements and stuff like that. Because you’ll go, ‘In that story, here’s what happens.’ Working with Chris Terrio and Geoff Johns and obviously Zack, we’ve done what any smart person would do and steal the best stuff you can from all the great material that’s out there.”
Does he know when we can expect this new Batman movie?: “I think they have a date for it, but honestly I don’t know if I’d be able to make that date because I don’t have a script that’s ready yet.
“My timetable is I’m not going to make a movie until there’s a script I think is good. I’ve been on the end of things when you make movies with a script that’s not good and it doesn’t pan out … I have a script, we’re still working on it. And I’m not happy enough with it yet to actually go out there and make a Batman movie – which has to have the highest standard. It would have to pass a very high bar for me.”
ZACK SNYDER ANSWERS SOME BURNING QUESTIONS AND IS HONEST ABOUT THE RECEPTION OF BvS AND HOW IT CHANGED THINGS:
Director Zack Snyder answered a few questions too. Will Lex be back?: “That’s a little bit of a spoiler … he’s in prison, so who knows? In the comic book world, prisons are pretty porous.”
What about Superman, will he be in Justice League? “There’s a process, clearly, that would have to go on … If he does appear, that would be a big part of the story.”
The single movie will focus more centrally on bringing the league together to fight the threat of Steppenwolf: “Now, we have a single enemy with a single objective and it’s about uniting a team.”
Snyder talked about the reception to BvS and admitted that it changed the direction of Justice League somewhat – this is apparetly something the reporters were hearing from crew around the set too: “When Batman v Superman came out, it was like, ‘Wow, oof.’ It did catch me off guard,” said Snyder.
“I really wanted the tone of the three movies to be different chapters, and not the same note you strike again … because of what fans have said and how the movie was received by some, we have really put the screws to what we thought the tone would be and I feel pressed it a little bit further.”
They weren’t allowed to see Superman’s costume from the movie and we’re hearing rumours that this time out his suit will be considerably different and his hair may be longer… a black and silver look, perhaps?
WILL JUSTICE LEAGUE OBVIOUSLY TIE INTO SUICIDE SQUAD AND THE GREATER DC CINEMATIC UNIVERSE?
Not too much, says Deborah Snyder: “All the films fit in a timeline but they’re independent. They all have their own tone, yet they’re all in the same filmic universe. There will be little bits of crossovers.”
Ben Affleck pipes up about Batman in this movie and the standalone and we like what he has to say: “The ‘world’s greatest detective’ aspect of Batman is more present in this story than it was in the last one, and will probably be expanded further in the Batman movie that I’m doing. I think all Batman stories at their heart are detective stories, that’s why they feel a little bit like noir movies. It could be The Maltese Falcon.”
Oh and Flash gets a sly little nod to Gorilla Grodd in too; in the scene in his apartment, Bruce says to him: “I know you have abilities. I just don’t know what they are.”
Barry replies: “My special skills include viola, web design, fluent in sign language [and] Gorilla sign language.”
GAME OF THRONES STAR SET FOR ATLANTIS
Kristofer Hivju, Tormund Giantsbane on HBO’s Game of Thrones (above) is set to play an “Ancient Atlantean King” in the movie. He certainly looks the part.
That’s all we got..
We’re not going to lie, we are giddy at pretty much all of this… let us know your thoughts.
Justice League arrives on November 17, 2017
Marc
Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….
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