There were three treatments that Alex Garland wrote before settling for the present story. The first treatment - the Dark Judges treatment features the encounter between Dredd and a rival judge by the name of Judge Death. However, Garland abandoned it after a year's work and 16 drafts on the story admitting that he couldn't crack much on that storyline. The second treatment is related to the Dredd and Cursed Earth storyline but was abandoned for the similar reason. The third treatment was an adaptation of the pro-democracy terrorists attacking the judges storyline but Garland felt that story and his ideas towards it were too grandiose in nature but stated that treatment would have been the third part of a trilogy, if there would be one. The final script that he wrote was based on the punchier short stories in the vein of cop movies such as Training Day (2001). John Wagner described the script as correcting the mistake in the earlier version of Judge Dredd (1995) that was considered too sweeping.