Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths Premier

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is an original DC Universe direct-to-DVD animated film. Many comics fan will recognise the basic premise from Grant Morrisons’s acclaimed JLA: Earth-Two graphic-novel, but this movie is an original story. It has its roots in the transition between the second and third seasons of the Justice League cartoon when it rebranded as Justice League Unlimited. Dwayne McDuffie was commissioned to write a movie that explained the differences between the two set-ups, but it wasn’t made. Fast-forward a few years and WB Animation have dusted down that script, reworked it to stand on its own, and released it as Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.

This clip from the movie of the JLA assembling their Watchtower/Satellite headquarters makes the connection pretty obvious – you can almost imagine the voices of the other original artists.

Newsarama hosted premier screens of the films on the East and West Coast. There was a live panel at the New York screening that was attended by James Woods (Owlman), writer Dwayne McDuffie, and voice director Andrea Romano. The West Coast premier was also have a panel hosted by Newsarama. It had larger roster including the executive producer Bruce Timm, the producers, and several actors.

At the East Cost panel James Wood’s described the thinking process of his Owlman character:

I was reading about an idiot savant chess player, and he went into real mental illness because he was so far ahead of his competitors that he got bored and was waiting to see them realize there was no way out.

McDuffie also expanded on the conversion from JLU to a standalone movie:

I was working on Justice League, and we were about to start Justice League Unlimited. The plan was to do a version of this story as a bridge from how they went from 6 characters to 60. There wasn’t the staff [at WB Animation] to do the design for both of these at once though.

Bruce Timm called me and asked if I’d be willing to rewrite it to be a bit more like the comics and less like the [cartoon] series. We switched Green Lanterns, we switched out all of the guest Justice Leaguers. In the TV series, they were all characters who had met Batman in other series.  The only one who was in both versions was Aquaman, who was going to be in there, cause I think Aquaman’s cool.

Wood’s then noted that he was the villain in the spoof Aquaman movie featured in the Entourage.

In a studio provided interview Executive Producer Bruce Timm was asked about the biggest challenge in translating a Justice League Unlimited script into a stand-alone movie.

The biggest challenge, and this is kind of esoteric, was that we had to find the line between the original source material and making it feel like a stand-alone movie so anyone that didn’t watch JLU could follow it. We really didn’t have to tweak the script too much – I think about 95 percent remains untouched. In terms of visual styling, we also wanted it to stand on its own and not necessarily as a continuation of the old show. We have this brilliant character designer – Phil Bourassa – who draws in a style similar to my own in terms of simplicity, but slightly different. So it doesn’t look 180 degrees away from the old show, but it definitely feels unique.

And, MTV’s Splash Page picked up on comments Dwayne McDuffie made about already having written two other animated movies.

“I’ve written two more [animated] movies,” said McDuffie. “I can’t say what they are, although I’m dying to say what they are. They’re really cool. [Warner Brothers Animation] kind of likes to announce just the next [animated film] to keep focused, but I think people are going to be pretty excited.”

The DVD and Blu-Ray copies of Crisis on Two Earths go on sale on Tuesday. I’ve got my blue ray copy on pre-order from Amazon, but it looks like there are a lot of copies out there already. I’ve got a saved search with Google that alerts me to new articles or webpages mentioning the Justice League and for the last week or so it has been inundated with links to pirate sites offering the film for download. I won’t download it, but I certainly won’t claim to hold the moral high ground. Nevertheless, I’ve been surprised by just how many times it’s been downloaded. A quick check of a couple of torrent sites shows 9000+ seeds/leechers for the most popular Crisis on Two Earths rip, which is three times more than for Smallville: Absolute Justice and comparable with the aggregate numbers for many motion pictures. Hopefully this will translate into enough sales to warrant subsequent Justice League movies.