Jay Baruchel spreads the word about his film Goon: Last of the Enforcers at Build Studio on August 29, 2017 in New York (Photo: Rob Kim/Getty Images)

With Wonder Woman standing tall as summer’s reigning box office superhero, all eyes now turn to Justice League to keep the DC Extended Universe on a winning streak. Eight years ago, though, excitement circled a very different Justice League feature: Justice League: Mortal, a motion capture-enhanced would-be blockbuster from director George Miller, who had employed that process for sequences from his Oscar-winning 2006 hit, Happy Feet.

Among its cast was comic book superfan Jay Baruchel, who wishes we all could see what we missed when Miller’s Justice League was scrapped after an extensive pre-production process. “It was going to be something special,” the Canadian actor told Yahoo Movies while chatting about his latest film, Goon: Last of the Enforcers, the sequel to the 2011 hockey comedy he’s directed, which opens in theaters and on VOD on Sept. 1.

The script by husband-and-wife team Kieran and Michele Mulroney would have pitted the League against a self-aware robotic army created by Batman himself. (To be fair, the Dark Knight intended them to be good guys, in much the same way that Tony Stark had initially hoped that Ultron would take some of world-saving burden off the Avengers’ shoulders in Avengers: Age of Ultron.) Baruchel’s role was as flesh-and-blood bad guy Maxwell Lord, who would’ve been on the ‘bots side.

View photos George Miller in 2017, eight years after Justice League: Mortal ended before it began. (Photo: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images) More

Baruchel gets excited describing Mortal‘s “unique” depiction of DC’s big two: the Caped Crusader (Armie Hammer) and the Man of Steel (D.J. Cotrona). “The Superman suit we were going to use is still my favorite that I’ve ever seen,” he raves. “From afar it looked normal, but if you got real close you saw that all of the blue [parts] were covered in super-small Kryptonian writing. It was just gorgeous.”

Hammer’s Batman, on the other hand, had seen better days. “It was a beat-up characterization,” Baruchel remembers. “You saw him bleed, get hurt and get his nose broken. There were pins sticking out of his knee! It was serious and brutal, and kind of what you think it would be with George Miller.”

Both Cotrona and Hammer endured brutal workouts to get into character, Baruchel recalls. “When I got down to [Australia, where the film was being shot], they had already been there for two months and were training like mad men every day,” he says. “They would do weight training one day, and fight training the next. They were going hard, hard, hard.”

View photos Armie Hammer and D.J. Cotrona were cast as Batman and Superman in Justice League: Mortal (Photo: Getty Images) More

Baruchel also added a few more details about Mortal‘s epic throwdown between Superman and Wonder Woman, which he teased during a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. In the sequence, the Amazon warrior (Megan Gale) would have been trading blows with a brainwashed Big Blue Boy Scout. “There was going to be a bad-ass fight in a skyscraper in Metropolis [that spilled] out into the street where they’re throwing parked cars at each other,” Baruchel says with glee. He was equally jazzed about Common‘s version of Green Lantern, which he says might have pleased fans who were left lukewarm by the Emerald Knight Ryan Reynolds eventually played in the 2011 misfire. “It was a much cooler, much less of an a–hole take on Lantern,” Baruchel says.