Geekwatch: JLA omnishambles revealed, Zombieland set for the small screen and Doctor Who takes the Tardis to the third dimension

More problems for the JLA
Warner Bros. should probably just admit defeat and scrap their much-mooted answer to Marvel’s Avengers already. Much like the characters who fill the pages of the comic books from which they take their inspiration, the JLA movie has lurched from crisis to crisis during recent years. The latest hammer blow to land on fans’ hopes of seeing DC’s finest team up on film came this week when rumours began to surface that studio bosses had scrapped a script from the pen of Gangster Squad scribe Will Beall.

The last we’d heard, the bean counters over at Warner Bros. were going to wait and see how Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel performed at the box office this summer before deciding to plough ahead with a JLA movie, which attempted to tie together a wider DC universe. However, if the peeps over at Badass Digest are to be believed the movie might already be dead in the water. The problem it seems, is that Beall’s script was just plain awful; a half-baked adventure in which Darkseid provided the catalyst to unite Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and co under the JLA banner.

Warners have reportedly struggled to attract a top-notch director to the project due to the inadequacies of the screenplay, and so have decided to take the script in another direction. All of which basically means that the JLA movie is back to square one, and a timeframe that already seemed rushed now looks nigh on impossible. It’s a mess and bad news for all involved. After all, this was a project that was meant to close the growing gap between DC and Marvel at the multiplex, not widen it.

There is a glimmer of hope for fans however. The 2015 release date always felt a little rushed and by forcing the studio to go back to the drawing board we might actually get a movie that’s worth waiting for rather than a rushed-out cash cow. Other sources also suggest that the script problems might force Warner Bros. to step up development of their proposed Batman reboot to fill the JLA shaped void in their superhero schedules. That’s obviously great news for fans of the Caped Crusader but also potentially for the wider DC Universe.

With Christopher Nolan’s take on the Dark Knight still fresh in people’s memories; it was always going to be tough to shoehorn one of the JLA’s founding fathers into any team up movie. The scheduling swap up however gives the studio an opportunity to follow the template laid out by Marvel, slowly building a wider universe through individual films rather than retconning existing properties into a new project.

What do you think about the JLA’s woes? Would you rather wait for a finished film that does the characters justice, or are you impatient to see the League take to the silver screen? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.


Zombieland TV series lumbers on
Like sparkly skinned emo vampires before them, Zombies are very much in vogue right now. You need only look at AMC’s record breaking ratings magnet The Walking Dead and the box office topping Warm Bodies to see that the undead genre is still very much alive and kicking. Despite the current rush of projects however, few can claim to be as successful as Ruben Fleischer’s smash Zombieland, a film which holds the unlikely honour as America’s highest grossing zombie movie to date.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that the movie is being rebooted for TV with Amazon following the trail blazed by the likes of Netflix by backing the project. Original writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are returning to pen the series, which was in fact how they originally envisaged the 2009 film.

The action will continue the adventures of Columbus, Tallahassee and Wichita previously played by Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone with the A-listers replaced by an all new cast. That cast will include Switched at Birth's Maiara Walsh who joins Tyler Ross and Izabela Vidovic on a project that looks like it’s well worth getting excited about.


And finally…
Doctor Who will be taking the Tardis to a whole new dimension after the BBC announced it would show the long running sci-fi series’ 50^th anniversary episode in 3D later this year.

The episode, which lands on 29^th November in the UK, will also be shown in cinemas giving fans who don’t own a 3D TV a chance to get in on the extra-dimensional action. The Guardian quotes a showrunner Steven Moffat who said: "It's about time. Technology has finally caught up with Doctor Who and your television is now bigger on the inside. A whole new dimension of adventure for the Doctor to explore."

Perhaps more exciting than that are current rumours which suggest that all 11 Doctors will unite for the anniversary special, although whether fans of the show on this side of the Atlantic will get to enjoy that particular nerdgasm in 3D remains to be seen.

What do you think about Warner Bros. JLA omnishambles? Are you excited about a Zombieland TV series and are you looking forward to experiencing Doctor Who in 3D? Let us know in the comments section below. 

- Daniel Bettridge