New Writers? Warner Bros. Wanted Ben Affleck as Batman? What's Going on With the 'Justice League' Movie?

On Thursday, Badass Digest reported that Warner Bros. had scrapped the script for Justice League, sending the project back to the drawing board. It sounds like Will Beall's script for the movie is "terrible," which isn't surprising to anyone who saw Gangster Squad, another movie based on a script written by Beall. Why can't DC make this project work? Why can't the studio find the magic needed to bring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman together in the same movie? Let's jump back to 2008 for a second.

In 2008, Marvel and DC both released monumental superhero movies. For Marvel, it was Iron Man, a film based on one of the company's lesser-known characters. It was also the company's first movie released under the Marvel Studios banner without another studio owning rights to the character. For DC, it was The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins, a movie that did decent business at the box office while reestablishing the character and saving the franchise from the Batman and Robin disaster. Both films received critical acclaim, and were box office successes. Iron Man made $318.41 million domestically. The Dark Knight made $534.86 million at the box office.

From this point, though, the roads diverge rather drastically for Marvel and DC. Between the summer of 2008 and the summer of 2012, Marvel was purchased by Disney, turned Thor and Captain America into box office hits, made an Iron Man sequel, produced a Hulk movie that established a connection between all of these movies and topped it all of by delivering The Avengers, a movie that got rave reviews and made $623.36 million domestically while shattering opening- and second-weekend box office records. In the United States alone, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has almost made $2 billion at the box office.

And DC?

Well, The Dark Knight Rises produced huge numbers at the box office, pulling in $448.14 million, but the film didn't live up the high standards of its predecessor. DC had to have done something else in that time, right? If you want to talk about the Green Lantern, I guess we can. That movie made $116 million in the United States and was a critical flop.

While Marvel and Disney have hit home run after home run with their franchises, DC and Warner Bros. have struggled to figure out what the plan is for their stable of superheroes. Zack Snyder is directing Man of Steel, this summer's reboot of Superman, and if that goes well it could be the lead-in to a Justice League movie, but even that's up in the air. Warner Bros. has admitted that they're kind of holding off on proceeding with Justice League until they see how the public responds to Man of Steel. And Batman? With Christopher Nolan's trilogy over, no one seems to know if DC will start from scratch with the character or allow Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play a non-Bruce Wayne version of Batman, which would connect Nolan's films with a Justice League film.

Over the past half a year, we've heard report after report about top-notch directors who have passed on helming Justice League. This is a high-profile project, so directors should be lining up to put their name on it. At one point, word got out that Ben Affleck was in talks to direct, but it seems like after he saw Beall's script, he passed. On Thursday, Latino-Review's El Mayimbe dropped the news that Warner Bros. didn't just want Affleck to direct — they wanted him to be Batman too.

While Warner Bros. goes back to the drawing board on Justice League, Marvel and Disney are preparing to distance themselves from their comic book competition even more, with Phase 2 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe already plotted out and ready to culminate with The Avengers 2 in 2015, which was also the year Warner Bros. hoped to get Justice League into theaters. Even if they hit that target, it'll mean that Marvel released another five films in the time it took Warner Bros. to even get Justice League out.

With the way the Justice League movie is going, any fans of DC should just get used to watching Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy on repeat and start praying that Snyder's Man of Steel is awesome. They should also go buy a ticket to The Avengers 2 now, since that's going to sell out like crazy.