The Justice League cartoon and its follow up series, Justice League Unlimited, were the final animated television entries in the DC Animated Universe, capping off a continuity that had begun all the way back in the beginning of the ’90s. Unlimited brought a lot of changes to the team which weren’t exactly explained in the course of the series, namely an expanded roster and a certain hero’s invisible transportation.
A planned movie would have bridged the gap between the two shows, explaining why everything was so different. Tentatively called Justice League: Worlds Collide, this planned animated movie would have had the Justice League facing their warped mirror images, and here’s how the project fell through and what it eventually became.
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Justice League: Worlds Collide
As mentioned, the planned movie was going to take place between the second season of Justice League and the first season of Justice League Unlimited. The villains of the film would have been the classic parallel Justice antagonists, the Crime Syndicate. The Justice League in the DCAU had by that point already fought evil counterparts in the form of the Justice Lords, whose storyline was originally meant to use the Crime Syndicate. This was one of a few times where original characters were used in place of a classic DC Comics team.
Other known plot elements about the film include explaining how Wonder Woman got her Invisible Jet, which simply appeared as an unexplained new part of her arsenal in Justice League Unlimited. It also would have laid the foundation for that series’ vastly expanded Justice League roster, which included the likes of Black Canary, Aquaman and others who were introduced in Unlimited. The film’s production had progressed pretty far and was right about to be recorded before being halted, but this wouldn’t exactly be the end of what Bruce Timm and company had originally planned.
Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Four years after Unlimited ended its run on television, DC and Warner Bros. released an original animated movie called Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths. As its name would suggest, it, like the Justice Lords episodes, combined elements of the Silver Age Crime Syndicate stories along with Grant Morrison’s more recent JLA: Earth 2. Even beyond sharing a similar plot, the film is very much the closest thing to an official release of Worlds Collide.
The plot has Wonder Woman absconding with Owlman’s stealth jet, which can turn invisible. This would explain the presence of said jet in Unlimited. Hawkgirl is also not present on the team, having briefly left the League in the first show’s finale. The Flash in the movie is also clearly Wally West, despite the Barry Allen version of the character having returned to prominence by then.
However, outright connections to the DCAU were removed in the film, and there are some very clear contradictions that achieve this goal. For one, Black Lightning is included in the film, but he wasn’t officially present in the TV series due to being one of several characters with legal entanglements surrounding their use. Likewise, John Stewart is replaced with Hal Jordan, who by that time had returned as the main Green Lantern in the comics. Even with these changes, it’s clear this is the closest fans would ever get to seeing the original plans for Worlds Collide.