Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths is a vast and expansive story with numerous moving parts. There are a slew of characters that make an appearance in the story across the 12 issues that the story has to offer, and some are more relevant than others in the modern DC landscape.
Jim Krieg, Butch Lukic, and Jeff Wamester were the team behind the films and revealed behind-the-scenes information about the films that have been released and are in production, talking to Sci-Fi Now. The trio was able to talk about some things that had to be left behind for the sake of the adaptation and how they pushed for it to be adapted properly.
Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths would have taken 5 films to get done properly
According to Butch Likic, Crisis on Infinite Earths was a vast story, one that would have required quite a reel length to do justice to. According to the creator, it would have taken five full-length animated films to do it right and adapt the story such that no important characters fall off the wayside. However, the team only ended up getting three films to adapt Crisis on Infinite Earths. Speaking to SciFi Now, he said:
“I was trying to push against doing it because it’s going to take five movies at least. Then they came back with ‘nah, we want three’.It was thirteen comics at the time. There’s no way we could do this in less than five movies, which would have been right but I think we got it good right here with the three movies because they’re a little longer than usual. So it all kind of works out.”
The five films would have comfortably accommodated the storyline, given how many worlds the story visits and how many characters it keeps from and center.
The films also had the burden of being multiverse stories at a time when multiverse stories have become the mainstay in superhero fiction. A lot of characters were cut from the films for a lew of reasons, whether it was the time constraint or the fact that they were no longer relevant in DC comics.
Some things that were cut from Crisis on Infinite Earths were “tragic”
Jim Krieg talked about what characters he didn’t feel much for when they were cut, and also the ones that he wished could have stayed in the story. He also revealed the criteria for which characters got to stay and which didn’t:
“Yeah, there are things that we had to cut that are tragic. Then there are things that we had to cut that are not that big… like I don’t miss Anthro and I don’t miss Orion. I missed the new Wildcat, that would have been fun.
There are some other classic characters we would have loved to spend time with. But it’s so weird to think that you have three movies and there were still characters that we ended up cutting out because it would have been too rushed.”
While a lot of characters did not make it to the final cut of the film because of the time constraints that were placed on the story, it was also the fact that a slew of characters could not be done justice in a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo and there was simply not enough time to spend with them.
There was also the fact that the films probably had to deal with fanservice and narrative more than other films, which is also a challenge that fans are key to see how the MCU handles with films like Deadpool & Wolverine and Avengers: Secret Wars
