Before director George Miller decided to return to the Mad Max franchise in 2015 with Fury Road, the Australian auteur was tapped by Warner Bros. to direct Justice League: Mortal in 2007. Now, 17 years later, we have another glimpse of what could have been thanks to filmmaker Ryan Unicomb. Miller’s latest, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, serves as a prequel to Fury Road, but was unfortunately a box office dud, and while these days Unicomb is using his talents as a Hollywood marketing guru, he was working on a documentary which has now fallen by the wayside that would have chronicled Miller’s version of Justice League.

Taking to his Instagram account earlier this week, Unicomb shared some photos of the late Hugh Keays-Byrne, who portrayed Immortan Joe in Fury Road before sadly passing away in 2020. The photos show his full transformation into J’onn J’onzz — a.k.a. Martian Manhunter — one of the original members of the Justice League that was set to appear in Miller’s canceled film. Check them out below.

Miller’s Justice League film was set to kick off a new franchise for Warner Bros. and DC, as both were eager to move on from Superman Returns’ less than stellar box office performance, which put any hopes of a direct sequel to rest. Instead, they looked to bring the comic book heroes together under one roof before branching off to give each one their own movie. They ultimately went in the opposite direction, starting with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel in 2013, before finally bringing Justice League to life in 2017.

This Isn’t Our First Look at George Miller’s Justice League: Mortal
Warner Bros. Pictures

Alongside Keays-Byrne, Miller’s Justice League: Mortal was also set to star D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Armie Hammer as Batman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Adam Brody as The Flash, Santiago Cabrera as Aquaman, hip hop artist Common as Green Lantern, Teresa Palmer as Talia al Ghul, and Jay Baruchel as Maxwell Lord. Over the years, a number of photos have been released – most by Unicomb – that give a further look at what Miller’s film would have looked like on the big screen.

Back in 2020, Unicomb shared a few images of some of the actors in costume, showing the superhero group together as one unit. At the time, he was planning to produce a documentary titled Seven Friends that would have taken us behind the scenes of Miller’s Justice League, but he revealed in a comment on his latest post that he’s no longer working on the project. Check out the photos below.

Would Miller’s Justice League: Mortal have been superior to the Zack Snyder version that came 10 years later? We’ll never know, but if you search online you can read the plot of the movie for yourself and draw your own conclusions. For now, we can only wonder what could have been had the director been given free rein to unleash the “crazy f*cking fever dream” that Baruchel called it in 2021.