Justice League Screenwriter Compares Original Draft to Back to the Future Part II

"My version of it owed a lot to Back to the Future II," the original Justice League screenwriter reveals.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Screenwriter Will Beall is time-traveling back to 2012: the year Warner Bros. hired the Gangster Squad scribe to write Justice League. In a new interview, the writer, whose credits include Bad Boys: Ride or Die and Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, reveals an early draft of the superhero ensemble movie was inspired by 1989's Back to the Future Part II.

The second act of Beall's script took place in a version of the Knightmare timeline — a nightmarish, post-apocalyptic possible future ruled by Darkseid — which was glimpsed in the Zack Snyder-directed Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021), Snyder's four-hour director's cut (a.k.a. the Snyder Cut). Even before Joss Whedon extensively rewrote and reshot the version of Justice League that ultimately released into theaters in 2017, Beall's script was dramatically different. 

"The biggest difference with mine, I think, was that much of the second act was that little sort of coda that was on the Snyder Cut, where it's this post-apocalyptic sort of dream sequence or flash forward, and there's good guys and bad guys, they're forced to team up. Much of my second act was taken up with that," Beall told TheWrap. "My version of it owed a lot to Back to the Future II."

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(Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures / Universal Pictures)

In the Back to the Future sequel, time-traveler Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) winds up in an alternate-reality 1985 after Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) steals and misuses Doc Brown's (Christopher Lloyd) DeLorean time machine to make himself rich and powerful. Their only chance to repair the present and prevent their future is in the past, at the point in time where the timeline skewed into the tangent that created Biff's "Hell Valley" nightmare reality.

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But Beall's unmade script wasn't entirely lost to the timestream. While 2017's Justice League was credited to Whedon and Chris Terrio, Beall received a "story by" credit he shared with Snyder and Terrio on Zack Snyder's Justice League, which restored and expanded the Knightmare sequences with new footage shot by the director. Beall went on to co-write the script and story for 2018's Aquaman, the only film set in the DC Extended Universe to earn over one billion at the box office.

"I'm proud of the script that I wrote and I'm happy that it helped. I feel like I did my job," Beall added of his Justice League screenplay. "So your first job as a writer, working with any of these things is to is to be a good steward. Right, it's sort of to 'do no harm.' And so you have to respect the fans and you have to respect the characters and and what makes them great, and not try to outsmart it."

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