Monthly Archives: February 2005

Dark Knite sent in a batch of questions about the Justice League cartoon and I’ve decided to post my answers up here in case anybody else was interested. First up, Star Crossed:

Spoilers Ahead…Continue reading →

Dark Knite’s second questions was:

I have been wondering for a long time why Justice League Unlimited airs only once a week when it is such an excellent show. I liked the former show better, of course but there are a lot of us old comic buffs out here that want more. One show once a week isn’t enough, and I can’t see how all of these obviously inferior cartoons are keeping the Justice League out.

Ah, now what we’re running into here is a demographic problem that the DC Animated shows have had since the original run of Batman: The Animated Series. On one hand you have the producers and the fans who love the sophisticated continuing storylines and on the other you’ve got the network and the advertisers who want to hit the key 6-11 kids marketing demographic. It’s part of the battle that saw the replacement of the BTAS franchise with the Batman Beyond series and the now famous controversy over the cut/uncut version of Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. Justice League suffers from some of the same problems. It’s premier had the largest 18-34 ratings in Cartoon Network’s history and it reached equal numbers of viewer in the 6-11 and the 18-34 age ratings brackets.Continue reading →

Dark Knite’s third and final question:

Also, it seems to me that Warner Brothers is missing out by not looking at a Justice League movie along the same lines as X-Men. A live action Justice League movie would be the greatest comic hero movie ever.

This one is slightly easier to answer as it’s all a question of licensing. DC Comics licences each of the characters for separate motion picture franchises. We know that Superman and Batman are definite for screentime, Wonder Woman is in development and it is rumoured that Green Lantern, Flash and even Aquaman franchises are trying to get started. To get a Justice League movie going you’d need to either buy back or negotiate to use all those options for a single project. Compare this to the X-Men franchise where the studio was able to easily buy a single option for the entire team.

Realistically I can’t seem much prospect for a big screen live actionJustice League movie while the independent franchises are active. If the options for the second tier characters fall through then I could just about imagine a studio going with a JLA minus Batman and Superman option. One thing I could easily imagine is an animated direct-to-DVD movie based on the cartoon. In fact the fourth season finale is rumoured to be a four-parter similar to three-parter Starcrossed .