One recent attempt that didn't make the finish line -- at least not yet -- was a Justice League movie. Director George Miller in 2007 was moving ahead for a 2009 tentpole with a script by Kieran and Michele Mulroney. He had either tested for or cast roles and was looking to shoot Justice League in Australia before the film derailed.
"It was wonderful and tragic at the same time," Noveck said of working on that project. "On the one hand, you get to work on what would be a serious, big, honest Justice League movie. As a fan, as someone who loves this stuff and grew up watching Super Friends and reading Man of Steel and Crisis, it would be like, 'Wow, I'm sitting here and they're doing computer models and all this stuff.' And to be really involved with the script process on that one with the writers, that was a phenomenal experience.
"Like any project in Hollywood
, sometimes development can get frustrating. We got to a point where the best draft of the script came in just as we were deciding that maybe this wasn't the best strategy to do with these characters.
"But that script still exists. The studio still wants to make a Justice League movie, I believe. You'd have to ask them. I don't want to go on record saying that they're going to make it. What I will say is that they're committed to these characters and they're committed to this universe. They want to see Batman, they want to see Superman, they want to see Wonder Woman and everybody else.
"The question becomes how and when and what's the best way to portray them. And it's a different answer every time. Because every time you look at the material and look at the state of what's going on, you get different answers. Sometimes it's, 'That script came in awesome. Let's do that one." Sometimes it's, "Can we get that filmmaker? We can't? Do we wait?'"