It’s been rumored for months, with steam really building behind the idea in the past few weeks, now Variety has confirmed that Happy Feet director George Miller will be the man behind the Justice League of America film being set up at Warner Brothers. The movie will pull together most of DC Comic’s most successful characters, although the actors who are recently known for playing them, Brandon Routh as Superman and Christian Bale as Batman, probably won’t be involved.

Interestingly, despite Miller’s more recent animated work, scuttlebutt on the film is heading back towards the movie being live-action instead of an animated film. I still find that incredibly surprising since part of the reason Warner Brothers is really moving forward as fast as possible on this project is because of the pending 2009 strike, with the hope of the movie becoming the centerpiece for the studio’s 2009 schedule. Animation might be able to make that, but a live-action film suffers more chances of being affected by the potential strike.

Although we have a director now, there’s still no solid news on casting other than Routh and Bale likely being uninvolved. Yet, Variety reports the project is casting-dependent and might not end up moving forward because of that, quoting someone as saying that because the picture is so complicated, it’s very complicated to make it happen. Again, wouldn’t an animated film solve some of those problems?

Expect JLA to become the new project under close scrutiny, with a lot of rumors flying around about it. After all, we know who our Watchmen are now, so what else are we going to throw random guesses out there about?