Screenwriter Will Beall has talked about his unused script for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and says it ‘owed a lot’ to Back To The Future II.
An entire book could be written about Zack Snyder’s Justice League, its difficult production, and its later re-edit. One of the first people to work on the 2017 superhero team-up film, though, was screenwriter Will Beall.
While 2013’s Man Of Steel was still in post-production, Beall was hired to write a script for Justice League – one that would ultimately go unused. David S Goyer was brought in as his replacement, and then Chris Terrio was later brought in to rewrite Goyer’s draft. Such is Hollywood.
Over a decade later, Beall has talked briefly about his involvement with the DC universe and his writing on Justice League in particular. He revealed that some of the ideas in his draft ended up in the finished movie, and he compared its use of alternate timelines to the much-loved sci-fi comedy sequel, Back To The Future II.
“I did a very early draft of Justice League,” Beall told The Wrap. “Some of it found its way into the Snyder cut. I was delighted that I could help… My version of it owed a lot to Back To The Future II.“
Read more: The story behind George Miller’s cancelled Justice League film
Beall then explained that the brief sequences in Justice League – in which we see a post-apocalyptic future where Superman’s gone rogue – played a much bigger role in his script.
Said Beall, “The biggest difference with mine, I think, was that much of the second act was that little sort of coda that was on the Snyder cut, where it’s this post-apocalyptic sort of dream sequence or flash forward, and there’s good guys and bad guys, they’re forced to team up. Much of my second act was taken up with that.”
More recently, Beall wrote the script for Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, which appeared on Netflix on the 3rd July. Beall’s Justice League work may have gone unused, but he at least managed to dig Eddie Murphy’s buddy cop franchise out of its 30-year development hell.
