ComingSoon Editor-in-Chief Tyler Treese spoke with Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths – Part One director Jeff Wamester, executive producer Butch Lukic, and producer Jim Krieg. The trio spoke about the scope of the DC story and sneaking in Easter eggs. The film is now available digitally and is set to release physically on 4K UHD and Blu-ray on January 23, 2024.
“Death is coming,” reads the movie’s synopsis. “Worse than death: oblivion. Not just for our Earth, but for everyone, everywhere, in every universe! Against this ultimate destruction, the mysterious Monitor has gathered the greatest team of Super Heroes ever assembled. But what can the combined might of Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern and hundreds of Super Heroes from multiple Earths even do to save all of reality from an unstoppable antimatter Armageddon?!”
Tyler Treese: Jeff, I love the portrayal of Earth-3 in this film. It’s so fun seeing such iconic characters with that evil twist to them. What did you like most about using them? Because them just wanting to punch the problem away was just hilarious to me.
Jeff Wamester: These are not philosophically well-thought-out characters, in terms of what they think about the world. They’re just like, “I want this.” And that’s how they operate. So, when we tackle these characters, when I was looking at them, I was like, “That is how they think about everything. If I want something, I just take it,” you know? And the whole world was built on that, and obviously that has heavy consequences. So it made it really fun to follow through throughout all of those scenes, like how they think and how they approache any problem.
Butch Lukic: Also, it’s nice to do the mirror version of well-known characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, and Batman, but the opposite of them — the bad side.
Jim Krieg: I wish we could spend more time there. In the original comic, Alexander Luther’s a bigger character, and we just kind of didn’t have time — even with three movies. To give him screen time would’ve taken away from the characters we know and love. He just ended up as a head-on-the-wall, but he’s in there.
Jim, how was it structuring these films and deciding when to stop and start each one? How is that process of finding the natural ending points and plotting this out?
Jim Krieg: It was really tricky because there’s so much in this series. in some ways, what we do with all of our DTVs, if they’re based on original comic stories, is we try to adapt the story you think you remember from when you read it as a kid. And a lot of times, you reread these as an adult and you go, “Oh, there’s some hanging chads here. It isn’t exactly what I remember.” So even though we all remember a little different, there are big moments that we all remember. In terms of Crisis, it’s often the comic book covers themselves that were huge moments that we wanted to build to.
Frankly, to some extent, we remember the art more than we remember the words and the story. Those big impact panels, the covers or the two-page spreads, are what are indelible. So we kind of had to retro engineer to get to those in the same way we retro engineered the entire Tomorrowverse to get to Crisis. We had to build in all those characters and all those relationships to get to a point where we could heartlessly kill them.
Butch, I wanted to ask about all the great callbacks to the other Tomorrowverse films. It’s incredible being on this journey and seeing all the callbacks. I love Ted Kord and Question getting their moments in this one. How was it incorporating them and giving these characters their moments? There’s already an attachment there for the viewers.
Butch Lukic: Well, yeah, I mean, that was intentional. Even when we first started doing those movies, the Tomorrowverse is like, “What characters that we’re going to build or that are going to appear in those earlier movies are we bringing forward to Crisis?” So it even became … a couple characters, we didn’t know how to approach them to get to Crisis right. On the flight, Jim realized, “Yeah, this character that’s a villain in this particular story, he could end up becoming this guy that’s important to Crisis.” And a couple of other characters that we Easter-egged in the earlier films ended up becoming important in Crisis, which for all people say about wanting Easter eggs and this and that and even DC and Warner Bros. … every Easter egg we ever put in these movies, no one found them.
Jeff Wamester: The hope is you go through all of the movies, then you go rewatch and go, “Oh, they knew. They knew.”
Butch Lukic: I was really worried, yeah. I was worried, “Uh oh. If they figure out this guy’s going to be this guy at Crisis, we’re screwed. That’s way too early.” But turns out no one could care less about our Easter eggs.
Jeff Wamester: I think people will spot them when they go back. If they look when they watch all that.
Butch Lukic: But again, that’s after the fact. Everyone’s an armchair general after the fact. Where’s the guy that spotted it early on? I want to meet that guy.
Jim Krieg: There are a couple. I saw that, occasionally, they would come up on a social platform I won’t name. And I thought, “Oh my gosh. He got it, and then everyone’s going to know,” but it just disappears. So many people have so many opinions, it just kind of not worth worrying about. Besides, these take so long that there’s nothing you can do about it if they do guess.
Jeff Wamester: No, there’s like, maybe one thing I saw like, “Ooh, that was a darn good guess right there.” They don’t know they’re right, but …
Butch Lukic: Yeah, he blindly found his way, but he didn’t, he didn’t realize where it was going to go.
Jim Krieg: I don’t even know, like if, in Justice Society, people knew that that was the Psycho-Pirate, you know? It’s because they never called him Psycho-Pirate. I don’t know. Some must have.
Jeff, the Flash is at the core of this story, and I really like the smaller moments we get between Barry and Iris. I thought that really grounded the film well. What did you like most about having Barry be the audience’s lens through this story?
Jeff Wamester: I haven’t gotten to do very many Flash stories, so it was really fun to channel him through this movie. But I agree with you. The grounding force on this was him and Iris, and having a relationship grow like it was is like … when directors get to do this stuff, it’s really fun to be able to have the audience have the lens or the window into what’s going on through them.
Jim Krieg: And it was totally necessary. The story is so huge and it has so many characters that you have to basically pick one or two to be the audience so that the audience is experiencing this vast, huge thing with them, because otherwise, it’s just too much and you can’t take it in.
Jim, in this film, we’re jumping back and forth between time periods. We’re going to different worlds. It’s a long, non-linear structure. How is it making sure viewers are don’t have the full picture, but that they’re not getting completely lost? How is it managing that?
Jim Krieg: Well, I mean, that’s a great question because you have to do it sort of on a wing and a prayer that, because some people are going to be totally confused. They’re just going to say, “I don’t understand where we’re at.” I think Jeff and Butch made sure there were enough visual clues to make sure you knew where you were in Barry’s life. But it is certainly not a traditional story with, “Guy gets a superpower.”
This thing … it’s definitely a challenge. And frankly, it’s not a kid’s story. You should be able to take a heavier dose of challenge in terms of understanding where you are in the story. If you’re confused for a minute, that’s okay. You know why? Because Barry’s confused. I mean, you might say, “Where the hell am I?” And, hopefully, at the same time, you’re going to hear Barry say, where the hell am I? And that’s okay.
Jeff Wamester: We’re trying to kind of ride the same thing — that lens of walking through. We don’t want you to know everything that’s going on too far before Barry. You need to be in the place that he is so you can mirror his emotion through that process and then start figuring it out.
Butch Lukic: Some people have mentioned it’s Christopher Nolan’s storytelling. Some of his stuff, of course, where it’s a puzzle that you have to basically jigsaw together, which is, again, a good storytelling trope which is rarely used. Slaughterhouse-Five is where Jim’s main inspiration came from.
Jeff Wamester: Listen, as the director going through this, it’s always a panic trying to make it work. You’re like, “Please tell me I’m making enough clues to make this work.” You’re adding [clues] here or there visually, but you don’t want it to be too much. It’s a balance you have to work through.
