This Could've Been The Best Comic Book Movie Ever!

David Goyer may have penned one of the best superhero movie scripts ever to be written.  Unfortunately, we'll never get to see it.  It passed away on the development shelves.

Back in the early 2000's. David Goyer, along with Justin Marks, wrote a script for a Green Arrow movie called, Green Arrow: Escape From Super Max.  In it, Oliver Queen was framed for murder and sent to prison.  The movie would follow him trying to escape.  The film also would have had cameos from a number of villains, like Lex Luthor, the Riddler, and the Joker.  This would've been the first movie based on a comic book character that not only focused on the hero, Green Arrow, but also the villains, kind of an early version of the Suicide Squad.  DenOfGeek recently sat down with Goyer and asked him about the film, and asked him if he thought that the movie was ahead of it's time.  Here's what he had to say:

"I think it absolutely was.  I think if that script had come over the transom a couple of years later… It was completely ahead of its time. By the way, everything I see about Suicide Squad looks fantastic and it’s a different story. But it was absolutely ahead of its time. You know, Marvel was considering doing the Sinister Six and at the time, God, I think this was eight or nine years ago that we wrote a couple of drafts, but it certainly was like this oddball project at Warner Bros at the time, they were like - even though the script was good - ‘why would we make a movie about a bunch of villains? That makes no sense’. The executive on it was really visionary, but the higher-ups, none of whom are at Warner Bros any more, just thought at the time, you know, we just want to make Batman and Superman movies. We don’t want to make any other characters. But this is before Marvel had really taken off, before more obscure projects like Guardians Of The Galaxy or Ant-Man or things like that had huge success, before the current gold rush I guess, if you will. It’s natural that eventually someone was going to make a villain movie, so that’s just what happened!"

I would've loved to have seen this movie.  It sounds like a sure fire winner in today's movie environment, but unfortunately it was created just a little too soon.  By the way, don't expect Goyer to be helming any DC movies any time soon, he said that he definitely won't be directing one of the upcoming films for the company.  That's a loss for DC, though.  I'm sure he would've given us an amazing movie to see.