Now, nearly four years after Snyder first stepped away from Justice League, his four-hour director’s cut is finally available for fans to view on HBO Max. It’s a surprising culmination of an intriguing series of events. And while it may not feature superpowered aliens and mystical MacGuffins, the story of how we got Zack Snyder’s Justice League is almost as interesting as the film itself.
Why did Zack Snyder quit Justice League?
After directing the Superman-centric Man of Steel in 2013 and the mini-team-up film Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016, Snyder was the obvious choice to take on Justice League. The story would unite some of DC Comics’ most popular characters in a battle to save the world. However, after completing initial filming on the DCEU’s first major crossover event in 2017, Snyder’s family was hit with immense tragedy. His daughter, Autumn, died by suicide in March of that year. After initially thinking that continuing to work on Justice League may be a therapeutic way to help him process his grief, Snyder eventually came to realize that the demands of shepherding the latest DCEU film to completion were too great to bear at the time. Snyder stepped away in May of 2017 to spend more time with his family, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “The demands of this job are pretty intense. It is all-consuming. And in the last two months, I’ve come to the realization…I’ve decided to take a step back from the movie to be with my family, be with my kids, who really need me. They are all having a hard time. I’m having a hard time.”
How did Joss Whedon get involved in Justice League?
Although Warner Bros. Pictures, which produces the DCEU films, fully supported Snyder’s decision to step away from Justice League in order to prioritize his family, the studio’s top priority was still seeing the film through to release. After Snyder opted out of pushing back the release date of the film in order to allow him to finish it, he decided to pass the baton to Whedon. He was no stranger to massive superhero stories uniting characters from across multiple solo films after directing the first two Avengers films for Marvel Studios. Originally, Whedon’s involvement was merely to write some new scenes for the film following Snyder’s road map, after Snyder screened a rough cut of the film and decided it was still missing a few pieces. When Snyder ultimately decided to step away entirely, Whedon was the obvious choice to step into what, at the time, everyone assumed would be more of a substitute teacher role than a creative one. Of Whedon’s hiring, Warner Bros. Pictures president Toby Emmerich said, “The directing is minimal and it has to adhere to the style and tone and the template that Zack set. We’re not introducing any new characters. It’s the same characters in some new scenes. He’s handing the baton to Joss, but the course has really been set by Zack."
What happened after Joss Whedon took over?
Despite the studio’s impression that Whedon’s directorial responsibilities would be “minimal” following Snyder’s departure, that quickly proved not to be the case. Justice League wound up filming months of reshoots after Whedon came aboard, costing Warner Bros. Pictures an additional $25 million on top of what they’d already spent. While reshoots are standard for most major studio fares, the price tag for Justice League’s additional photography was several times above a typical reshoot budget, and its three-month timeframe far exceeded the few weeks traditionally scheduled for this sort of work. Ultimately, Whedon’s contributions to the film wound up being significant enough to earn him an official cowriting credit, even though his role was initially intended to be uncredited.
The controversies around filming
Far from seeing the film smoothly and without incident through post-production, Whedon’s tenure on Justice League was plagued with problems right from the start. First, and of trivial importance compared to what came later, the extensive reshoots required to cover all of Whedon’s new scenes (some of which were Snyder’s idea; many of which were not) cut into Superman actor Henry Cavill’s shooting schedule for Mission Impossible: Fallout, for which Cavill had grown a thick mustache. Because Mission Impossible distributor Paramount wouldn’t allow Cavill to shave the mustache, the Justice League visual effects team was forced to have to digitally remove Cavill’s facial hair in post-production, a decision that will live on in infamy forever. More seriously, numerous actors of color had their roles cut or significantly reduced for the film, including eliminating the roles of Ryan Choi (Zheng Kai), Elinor Stone (Karen Bryson) and Iris West (Kiersey Clemons), and cutting a significant portion of the material shot for Justice League member Cyborg/Victor Stone (Ray Fisher) and his father, Silas (Joe Morton). (Fisher later alleged in an interview with Forbesin 2021that he was certain that race was a “determining factor” in the decision to reduce screen time for multiple actors of color.) Furthermore, in 2020, Fishermade claims that Whedon’s treatment of the cast and crew while on the set of Justice League was “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.” Warner Bros. Pictures subsequently commissioned an independent investigation into Fisher’s claims, although that investigation hit a number of difficulties, including alleged lying on the part of both the investigator and WarnerMedia, according to Fisher. He expounded on his claims about Whedon and his experience on Justice League in his Forbes interview. “Race was just one of the issues with the reshoot process. There were massive blowups, threats, coercion, taunting, unsafe work conditions, belittling, and gaslighting like you wouldn’t believe,” he said. Following Fisher’s allegations, his fellow Justice League member and Aquaman star Jason Momoa threw all of his Atlantean weight behind his costar, posting on Instagram, In February of 2021, several weeks after Fisher issued a statement regarding his treatment at the hands of Whedon and Warner Bros. following his firing from the upcoming DCEU film The Flash, Charisma Carpenterreleased her own statement in support of Fisher. She revealed her own abuse allegations at Whedon. The actress previously worked with Whedon from the late ’90s into the early 2000s on the sets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff series, Angel. Following Carpenter’s statement, numerous other Whedonverse alumni, including Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar, released their own statements of support, some of which corroborated Carpenter’s allegations.
How did fans react to Joss Whedon’s Justice League?
Despite Mustachegate and rumblings that Whedon may have left much more pronounced fingerprints on the final product than originally intended, Justice League still managed to make its way into theaters on time in November of 2017. Unfortunately, reactions to the film were tepid. While audiences could find plenty to like about the characters and action sequences, viewers couldn’t help but be bothered by Justice League’s weak plot and two-dimensional villain, in addition to being turned off by poor CGI (which the mustache definitely didn’t help). Ultimately, Justice League just wasn’t strong enough to rise above the behind-the-scenes problems with its filming. The finished product turned into what one insider called a “Frankenstein” of a film, composed of bits and pieces of two very different directorial visions and copious studio notes, which wound up disappointing many.
Calls to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut begin
Perhaps it should’ve been unsurprising, given the myriad issues getting the film completed and the loud rumors that what audiences received was a very different film from what Snyder originally handed off to Whedon, that it didn’t take long for some to voice their desire to see Snyder’s version of the film. A petition was quickly started demanding for Warner Bros. to release a version of the film that “restores the removed scenes and original vision that Zack had for the film before his departure.” Additionally, a social media hashtag was started asking Warner Bros. to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, which rapidly gained quite a bit of traction among DCEU fans. In addition to the viral hashtag and a letter-writing campaign, fans also crowdfunded efforts to buy billboards in Times Square and San Diego, flew a banner over the Warner Bros. studio lot and bought ad time during the FA Cup. Of course, despite their impressive efforts, releasing the Snyder cut was easier said than done, since at the time that the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag started circulating, the Snyder Cut didn’t really exist. There was the rough cut that Snyder screened for Whedon, but even that was missing key scenes and important post-production work that Snyder had wanted for the finished version of the film. It wasn’t a matter of simply stitching a series of complete but deleted scenes back together, but rather filming brand new ones, as well as completing the original Junkie XL score and extensive visual effects work. Quite simply, the “Snyder Cut,” as it existed, was far from being finished. And the cost to get it from concept to finalized film would’ve been prohibitively expensive, making it little more than a pipe dream for frustrated fans–or at least, so most of us thought.
Why did Warner Bros. decide to move ahead with the Snyder Cut?
Against all odds and despite the significant hurdles standing between what currently existed and a finalized version of his fully realized Justice League vision, Snyder announced to gleeful and incredulous fans in May of 2020 that the Snyder Cut was indeed going to be a reality. And that they could watch it exclusively on HBO Max. It turns out that persistence, sometimes, actually does pay off, even in Hollywood…but it helps if you can get some A-list stars on board. The next day, Warner Bros. was on the phone, The Hollywood Reporter reported. “This is real,” Snyder recalled Emmerich saying. “People out there want it. Would [Snyder and his wife, Deborah Snyder, who is also his producing partner] ever consider doing something?” Despite Justice League’s lukewarm reception and the intimidating cost involved in completing Snyder’s version of the film, demand was deemed high enough to make the Snyder Cut a worthwhile endeavor.
Making the Snyder Cut
Once work on the Snyder Cut of Justice League was officially underway, it became clear just how much work still had to be done in order to create the movie in Snyder’s head. Together with Deborah, Snyder put together a presentation for Warner Bros. executives, screening his score-less, effects-less, reshoot-less black and white rough cut of Justice League, then pitching his ideas for how to complete it. It turned out that far from the “minimal” input Whedon was originally said to have, he’d ultimately wound up contributing nearly 80 new script pages to the theatrical cut of Justice League, making the film arguably more Whedon’s than Snyder’s. In fact, Whedon changed so much that Snyder (who has not actually seen the film) guessed that the theatrical version of Justice League was only about 25 percent his work, and therefore promised that the Snyder Cut would be “an entirely new thing.” Of course, shortly after that, the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., forcing movie and TV productions to shut down nationwide. At first, Snyder worried that the pandemic meant that the Snyder Cut would have to be put on hold, but then he and Deborah realized that bringing the new Justice League to life could actually be a boon for a suddenly struggling industry. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Deborah said, “People thought, ‘It won’t be possible to ramp up, and that maybe this should go on the back burner.’ But we said, ‘No, this is the right time’ because our visual effects houses…are running out of work, so now is the time to be doing this.” As for reshoots, that effort proved trickier in COVID times, but Snyder and his cast made it work. Although only four minutes of new footage wound up making it into the Snyder Cut, meaning the ultimate product was composed nearly entirely of footage Snyder had originally shot before he stepped away from the film in 2017. Still, he made those four minutes count, bringing back Affleck, Cavill, Fisher, and Miller for short new scenes, as well as bringing in Amber Heard, Jared Leto and Joe Manganiello to reprise their roles as Mera (Aquaman), the Joker (Suicide Squad), and Deathstroke, respectively. All told, the Snyder Cut of Justice League wound up costing Warner Bros. at least an additional $70 million, on top of the original film’s already whopping $300 million budget. It’s a staggering sum to spend on any single film, but during a year in which many other productions were unexpectedly shut down or forced to cut back, it wound up providing plenty of work for visual effects studios who may have otherwise been left scrambling for projects. According to Deborah Snyder, “We had to do, in like six months, 2,650 some odd visual effects shots. And normally when you do these movies, what happens is as you’re shooting you start turning over shots. We had a lot of assets built, but the way the theatrical release was done, they changed a lot of things. And through the process when we were working in the movie, some things they wanted Zack to change–some of the characters. So we went back to Zack’s original intentions as far as the characters, and had to build those models. And then there were just so many shots to do.” Once the immense project of re-shooting, re-scoring, re-editing, and redoing the visual effects for the Snyder Cut was complete, the final film came in at a bladder-bursting 4 hours and 2 minutes. The long-awaited Snyder Cut–now officially titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League and divided into six “chapters” plus an epilogue–debuted on HBO Max in the U.S. March 18, 2021.
Was it worth it?
It was a four-year labor of love, trauma, frustration and perseverance, but once Zack Snyder’s Justice League finally was finally available to fans, it turned out to have been worth the wait, at least for most viewers. Currently sitting on Rotten Tomatoesat a respectable 73 percent among critics and an impressive 96 percent among audiences (as opposed to the original Justice League’s 40 percent and 71 percent, respectively), the film is largely considered a vast (if imperfect) improvement over the much-maligned version of the film that stumbled into theaters in 2017. Additionally, Snyder’s version of the film restored Fisher’s character, Cyborg, to the version of the character that Snyder originally pitched to Fisher. Seen by some now as “the heart of Justice League,” Snyder considers the Cyborg of his version of the film “the center of the movie.” For his part, Fisher’s excitement about the Snyder Cut feels nearly proportional to his frustration over the production of the original version of the film. On the day of the film’s release, Fisher tweeted, “This is for those that fought. This is for those that believed. This belongs to each and every one of you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Now let’s break the internet. #Snydercut”. In addition to fleshing out the Cyborg arc that Snyder and Fisher had originally planned, the Snyder Cut also beefed up and restored the screen time for numerous characters of color who were previously excised from Whedon’s version. Those are just a couple of the major changes made from the original version of the film, most of which, fans seem to agree, have been for the better. Although of course, from the point of view of many of the fans, Whedon was the one making the big changes, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League has always held the title of being the true “original.” Next, these are the superhero films we can’t wait to see in 2021!
