It wouldn’t be a day of the week ending in –y if we didn’t have some juicy HOTT GOSS about the Justice League movie, and wouldn’t you know it – it’s all really bad. First up, there’s a fat nugget of rumor jizz drying on our prom dresses regarding the first screenplay, penned by Gangster Squad’s Will Beall. According to Badass Digest, which is like Reader’s Digest but in a monster truck, Warner Bros. and DC read it and determined that they had approximately 110 pages of toilet paper.

The story from each source is the same: it’s terrible. Some sources seem to think the whole movie is going to fall apart and never happen, while some believe that Warner Bros will keep moving forward, unwilling to lose the superhero arms race.

Beall’s script was focusing on a 4-man and 1-woman Justice League, as Superman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Batman and Wonder Woman would be taking on Darkseid in an Avengers-like battle to save the Earth. Unfortunately, it seems that the Warner and DC execs have been f*cking with the story so much that Beall never stood a chance.

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The opening title card of Gangster Squad says “inspired by a true story,” which is pretty funny, considering the movie immediately following it is Sin City meets Young Guns in the form of a Jimmy Cagney parody. As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but think “wait, wait, slow down, which part of this is the true part? Is it the black guy who throws knives? The evil mobster who says things like ‘I miss that red snatch!’ and ‘you know the drill,’ before he kills guys with a power drill? Ooh, or maybe it’s the lead evil henchman with a scarred eye, or the part where the cop and the bad guy drop their weapons to ‘settle it like men’ in a climactic fist fight!” Goodness, am I even going to be able to review this without a history degree? Books should have more slow-motion shell casings falling to the floor, I always say.

I haven’t read Tales from the Gangster Squad, the stylized non-fiction book by LA Times reporter Paul Lieberman (collected from his series in the Times) upon which the Will Beall script was based, but as far as I can tell, the true part of Gangster Squad is that some of the names and places are real, as well as a couple throwaway lines about Frank Sinatra and the idea that there was a unit called “the gangster squad” in the first place. The rest? Let’s just say… liberties seem to have been taken. I can’t help but doubt the veracity of a movie that begins with a fake-nosed Sean Penn laughing as he has an enemy torn in half by two cars pulling in opposite directions. “Do ya woist, Mickey!”, the doomed guy shouts, defiant until the bitter end, as eighties action movie logic would dictate. No need for empathy here! When underlings fail him, Penn’s Cohen has them shot, burned alive, murdered with power drills, etc., like the Darth Vader of Sin City, only without Frank Miller’s penchant for high contrast and constant crotch trauma. I realize “Mickey Cohen” was a real guy, but if we depicted Al Capone as a mustache-twirling evil-doer, cackling as he tied a swooning dame to the railroad tracks, what would the compelling part of that be? That it was… uh… inspired by… true-ishness? I don’t get it.

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Despite having no director, presumably just one actor and simply existing as a clump of muddled rumors that all involve some variation of the phrase, “You know, just like Marvel’s The Avengers”, Warner Bros. and DC Comics are still gung ho on getting a Justice League super-movie into theaters in 2015 to compete with Avengers 2. Last we checked in on the rumors, we were sweeping the idea that Joseph Gordon-Levitt may pick up the Batman torch in time to join the League under the rug, and focusing on Latino Review’s scoop that DC had selected Darkseid to be the villain.

We now also know that Will Beall is penning the JLA script, and that’s great news for anyone who was hesitant to see Justice League unless it was more like Castle. In fairness, Beall has a hot run ahead with Gangster Squad, Logan’s Run and Lethal Weapon 5, which is strange, because I swear that was already made.

Latino Review has another exclusive bombshell this week, as they claim to know that the storyline of this new superhero franchise will revolve around Justice League issues 183-185, and I am not going to describe them because I just assume that you have them committed to memory. Oh fine…

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(*sigh*)  I’m too old for this sh_t.

That’s right, Warner Brothers has hired a writer to reboot the Lethal Weapon franchise.  THE DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY, IT DOES NOTHING!  Because when I think of premises Hollywood hasn’t already done to death, I think interracial buddy cop movie.  Apartheid schmaschmartheid, maybe in this version, Riggs can stop the oven-dodgers from causing all the world’s wars.

DEADLINE MAKES ME WANNA SMOOOOOOOKE…

Warner Bros and producer Joel Silver have set Will Beall to write Lethal Weapon, with a take that will relaunch the buddy cop series with a new cast. Beall, a former LA police officer who patrolled South Central and wrote the novel L.A. Rex, has seen his stock rise at the studio because of his script Gangster Squad, the period crime drama about an elite crime squad that fought against organized crime kingpins like Mickey Cohen. Zombieland helmer Ruben Fleischer has come aboard to direct that film.

Warner Bros has been messing around for some time with Lethal Weapon 5, with a treatment written by original scribe Shane Black. The plan was to bring the original team back, but schedules didn’t match up and Mel Gibson’s image has taken a self-inflicted beating [much like my wang -ed].  Beall pitched a take that maintains the tone of the original–a hard R-rated edgy street cop movie.

But will it be as good as Takers??? The only real question now is whether to do a sort of girl power take on it with Katherine Heigl and Queen Latifah, or go traditional and cast Channing Tatum and Nick Cannon.  Decisions, decisions.

AFTER THE JUMP: Some other interracial buddy cop flicks, just off the top of my head…