*UPDATE* Okay, so a week ago a fan claimed Zack Snyder confirmed to him that the mythical #SnyderCut of Justice League isn’t such a myth, after all. I didn’t focus too much on it in the below piece because there was no reason to believe the guy. Well, somebody came with receipts.
While the quality is kinda muddy, this Instagram post does have Snyder saying “Sure, there’s a cut and it’s done…I have a cut. I have a bunch of them…it’s up to them.”
Basically, he’s saying it’s up to Warner Bros. to release his cut of Justice League, which they would certainly never do. Why in God’s name would they put out a two-year-old movie that few saw and fewer liked, especially as they are turning the corner with Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and Shazam? Who needs that kind of callback? Nobody, and that includes you #ReleasetheSnyderCut faithful. You don’t need it either. Here’s that Instagram post followed by the original story.
Geezus, Zack Snyder is making more news now than he ever did as a director. He apparently had quite a lot to say over the weekend during a Director’s Cut event, including a brief rant about how fucked up he thinks superheroes are, and that mindset was clearly part of the first draft of his Justice League script. Snyder says that script, which was co-written by Argo writer Chris Terrio, got axed because Warner Bros. was already feeling the heat from negative reaction to Batman v Superman.
Here’s what Snyder said according to ScreenRant‘s Stephen M. Colbert…
“When this movie came out, understand that Chris Terrio and I had finished the script to ‘Justice League’ before ‘BvS’ came out,” explained Snyder. “Some people didn’t like the movie. A vocal minority. So they said, ‘There’s a lot of stuff we don’t want you to do. So, we did a rewrite from that script.”
“So the original ‘Justice League’ script, we didn’t even shoot. The really scary version. Because we were really nervous after the response.”
BvS got hammered pretty bad so it’s no surprise Warner Bros. got cold feet about Justice League, and it just goes to show that long before Snyder got replaced by Whedon there were already problems. Remember, the film was originally going to be a two-parter with the villain Darkseid included. And another part that got cut out was a followup to the apocalyptic Knightmare sequence seen in BvS. Snyder goes into a bit more detail on what he intended with that…
“The truth is that the Knightmare sequence in this movie is always something that I intended to explain and we end up in a future Earth where Superman has succumbed to the Anti-Life equation and there’s a few surviving members of the Justice League, and a broken Cyborg was working with Batman to send Flash back to warn Bruce. There was a scene in the trailer, apparently, it didn’t make it into the movie, where Bruce says Flash came to him and warned him that ‘Lois was the key’ and something darker was coming.”
Apparently there was also a scene in which Darkseid would have murdered Lois Lane inside the Batcave, which is dark stuff indeed.
Not sure audiences would’ve been receptive to that, either. Anyway, I’m sure one of these days someone will put a mic and a camera on Snyder and let him riff on this stuff endlessly. For now we’ll have to take what he gives in bits and pieces. Or hopefully he’ll direct something soon and can start talking about new things and not old shit he never got to do. Kinda over it.
Unfortunately, the conversation will never stop as long as there’s an outcry to see the #SnyderCut of Justice League. Whether it actually exists has been a question pondered far longer than it has any business being, but one fan did take a moment to ask Snyder about it. And guess what? He says that shit is real…
Even though I wasn’t able to ask my question during the Q&A I did get the chance to ask Zack face to face about the Snyder cut. He said “the movie is done, it exists” but basically it is up to WB. He is not aware that WB has any plans to release. Bittersweet #ReleaseTheSnyderCut pic.twitter.com/MrkdduStre— Carlos Pro (@CarlosdaPro) March 25, 2019
I have no reason to believe whoever this fan is, and I suspect Snyder likes to keep this controversy going because it keeps his name out there. But I hope, for this fan’s sake, maybe Snyder will have a super secret screening of it just for the most die-hard #ReleaseTheSnyderCut true believers out there.
