Justice League

For getting the team together in a way that doesn't reuse the alien invasion or uses a Legion of Doom, I'd suggest Dr. Destiny. He's large scale, can go even global, he's a single villain who can be explained away with uber science, he's got a menacing design that could be adapted to live action, and he already was used to bring the League together post Crisis, in the Grant Morrison era. He also can be creepy as hell, and his reality warping messing with the heroes' mind means we could get some necessary introspection for each one of them, bringing the audience to date with them. We discover them as they rediscover themselves.

Better that IMHO than a giant starfish.

Failing that, Amazo. A team wrecker they really need to work together to beat, without the need to introduce really any more villains than his creator.

edited 21st Oct '12 8:22:54 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

I freaking love Dr. Destiny, so I think a movie with him in it would be awesome.

Ooh! Sandman crossover :P

At first I thought that Amazo would probably work best for a sequel, since he involves the team already being made, but then I had the idea of him being created specifically to copy and counter Superman, and then becoming more powerful and dangerous than expected when he starts copying other super powered beings, requiring the League to form together to stop him.

edited 21st Oct '12 9:33:34 AM by KnownUnknown

Yeah, that's along the lines of what I was thinking.

Sandman's not in continuity with the DC Universe, and even if that DID happen, they'd probably make Dream fight a giant spider or something.

Sandman is in continuity with the DC Universe. Characters from the Justice League have shown up in Sandman and viceversa. It's just they prefer to remind us of that as little as possible.

edited 21st Oct '12 11:48:32 AM by NapoleonDeCheese

But Gaiman pretty much disowned those early Sandman stories in the opening of the first volume.

Superman, Batman, Martian Manhunter, and Darkseid all show up in the Wake storyline. And then after Sandman ended Dream II showed up in Grant Morrison's Justice League run and Geoff Johns' Justice Society run, both of which were done with Gaiman's permission.

And then a year or so prior to the reboot Gaiman co-wrote an issue of Action Comics where Lex Luthor met Death during his search for a Black Lantern ring.

Wasn't Dream once in a Justice League storyline? He helped them against that giant starfish guy, IIRC.

Regardless, I doubt he'd be in a Justice League film (awesome though that would be :V)

Actually, now that I think of it, Vandal Savage could be a cool villain who doesn't require a ridiculous amount of build-up.

Write him like how he's written in the Young Justice TV series, where he thinks superheroes coddle society and prevent mankind from reaching its evolutionary potential. So he sets a plan in order to start killing off Earth's superhumans, and the Justice League bands together to combat his scheme.

I'm not sure that'd be a great plot, because the heroes would essentially be banding together out of mutual self-interest to save their own asses. I want to see them saving the world because they're heroes, not saving themselves because they're threatened.

Yes, Dream (or, as he is called now, Daniel) was in one of Grant Morrison's JLA stories.

edited 21st Oct '12 5:17:25 PM by Robbery

I think Daniel's just the name of his current aspect. He's still Dream, just as Morpheus was Dream. They are both different aspects of the same primeval force.

It wouldn't have to be out of self-interest or self-preservation. Just expand Savage's plot beyond simply killing off heroes so that there's a larger threat for the team to unite against. Savage's disdain for superheroes could just be a MacGuffin to bring the heroes together.

Maybe Batman gets suspicious when he hears about the mysterious deaths of some Red Shirt heroes and starts an investigation, which leads to him bumping into the others and eventually forming a team to stop the bad guy.

edited 22nd Oct '12 12:24:29 AM by comicwriter

The ultimate issue always comes down threat level, it's not enough to just have a smart villain but one who poses a threat that can only be met by our heroes. The Avengers went with an Alien Invasion because that is the most straightforward threat, it would be hard to establish anything earth bound as being worthy of such a team-up. I'm certain Darkseid would be the most popular choice, Savage is interesting but his quirk is his immortality and intelligence and not his power level (I initially thought Ras Al Ghul might have something interesting to offer but recent exposure in TDKR might be an issue).

I think the best thing they could do to break away from The Avengers would be to structure their story around confronting a more immediate, world-wide threat instead of an imminent danger. Superman and The Flash are already capable of swift world travel and thus you could get a running series of conflicts that leads into a more centralized climax. I'm thinking largely about how Justice League tended to handle their big episodes and it was always about multi-tasking the problem ("Starcrossed" had them retaking the watchtower alongside assaulting the mothership to deactivate the shield on the Doomsday Device).

The capacity for a villain to be an adequate threat for a hero or team of heroes isn't solely based off of "power level" - Vandal Savage is primarily an enemy of teams of heroes rather than a single one, you know. And he has a long history of pretty dangerous plans.

I'm pretty sure the writers would have no problem thinking of something to put into a film.

edited 22nd Oct '12 10:26:19 AM by KnownUnknown

Vandal Savage is a great, criminally under-used villain.

But the issue is why he would be the reason the league forms together. If the league is already together I can see Vandal being able to manipulate the individuals to his own ends but there has to be a big instigating reason for the heroes to need each other. There is always the worry that Superman might go rogue but once that is resolved what else is there to direct their heroics?

I think this movie will be going on my "I'll believe it when I see it" pile.

I agree with an earlier poster that World's Finest should happen before the Justice League movie, but more because that plotline was the start of Superman and Batman's rivalry and friendship. Doing that in a Justice League film would be... meh. I would pass on that.

I've just started reading Grant Morrison's run of JLA and personally I think a combination of A New World Order and the Justice League Cartoon's "Secret Origins" could work really well as a film. Martian Manhunter was a great central character for uniting/recruiting the other members of the League together and while the aliens in Secret Origins are quite generic the white martians in A New World Order have a very charismatic presence and have a very different approach to alien invasions compared to the Chitauri and the like.

They feel like a proper, powerful enemy to serve as a worthy match against the Justice League whilst also having actual personalities to separate them from the faceless horde of generic enemies that were the alien invasion in the Avengers.

Some of the stuff in the New 52's JLA run could work as well. For example I think Cyborg's origin works as a great way to just establish that there are lots of heroes starting to pop up in the world without the need for some pointless narration. Of course since the first enemy in that series was Darkseid it might not be a good idea to drop him first up when Avengers 2 will use Thanos as well.

edited 26th Oct '12 3:38:55 AM by ShadowScythe

Yeah, a World's Finest movie would be best.

Set up a good story for Superman and Batman to team up, to let the viewers dip their feet into the idea of a crossover, so that they can show like at the end or so of the movie that, hey, there's more heroes to DC's movies than just Superman and Batman.

edited 26th Oct '12 3:43:01 AM by TechPowah

They could always use a World's Finest movie to introduce Wonder Woman.

After that the only major people we need to worry about are Flash and Aquaman since Cyborg can become a hero during the JL movie like in the reboot and Green Lantern can be used to introduce the threat (if it is Darkseid).

They could always save Aquaman for a sequel - the modern version of him is so defined by his role as kind... or at least he was a few years ago (I dunno if they changed him after the reboot)... that I got the impression he should best be introduced by a conflict that specifically involves Atlantis in a major way.

edited 27th Oct '12 11:42:33 AM by KnownUnknown

They should have Aquaman watch Super Friends and be jealous of the other heroes over how lame the show made him compared to them.

edited 27th Oct '12 7:39:07 PM by TechPowah