In less than a month, Zack Snyder’s 4-hour cut of Justice League arrives on HBO Max. This comes with the director and his loyal fans spending close to 4 years championing such a release, after he was replaced by Joss Whedon on the 2017 version that everyone hated. But there was always more to the story; he didn’t just quit because of family tragedy, there was also a bit of a shoving by WB execs unhappy with his work on the film. Some of this was detailed by Snyder just weeks ago, but now a new profile by Vanity Fair reveals even more about the pressure he was under by the arrival of Whedon.
What it boils down to is this: following the critical backlash against Batman v Superman, WB decided to have producers Jon Berg and Geoff Johns (two notorious figures in the Ray Fisher scandal, btw) “babysit” Snyder, to make sure he delivers a crowd-pleasing film.
“You could say babysit,” Snyder said. “It didn’t bother me too much because they weren’t that threatening. I just felt the ideas they did have, where they were trying to inject humor and stuff like that, it wasn’t anything that was too outrageous.”
However, when the movie was completed, WB wasn’t at all happy with it, and brought in Whedon with the plan that he would simply do some rewrites. However, that was just the beginning, and Snyder saw that Whedon was going to have a lot more power than he was willing to give. Snyder quit the production after just one meeting with Whedon as the reshoots drew near. He says Whedon went on to reshoot “three-quarters” of his movie.
“We just lost the will to fight that fight in a lot of ways,” said Snyder. “All of us, the whole family, we’re just so broken by [losing Autumn] that having those conversations in the middle of it really became…I was like, ‘Really?’ Frankly I think we did the right thing because I think it would’ve been either incredibly belligerent or we just rolled over.”
But Snyder’s back in control now, and given an additional $70M to make the Justice League he always wanted to make. Over the years we’ve seen Snyder make a lot of promises, including numerous DC Comics heroes showing up that fans have long wanted to see, and some that weren’t expected like Jared Leto’s version of Joker, with a brand new image of him as the Clown Prince of Crime.
According to the report, Snyder “has reshot the ending with a hero cameo that will blow hard-core fans’ minds.”
The first and most obvious pick is that it’s Green Lantern, right? Who else would make that kind of a fanboy impact? But even if GL does show up, does it really matter? There are zero plans to continue on with the SnyderVerse after this, so any character he uses will probably be recast or just straight-up ignored. I’d kill for it to be like Plastic Man or Detective Chimp, though. Or maybe Ryan Reynolds rockin’ the emerald one last time? Just sayin’.
We’ll find out when Zack Snyder’s Justice League hits HBO Max on March 18th.
