The release of an official cut of 2017’s Justice League from former-director Zack Snyder has finally been announced, following a long campaign by fans. The film will be coming to HBO’s streaming service HBO Max in 2021, as revealed by a haunting trailer that dropped earlier this month and looks set to rework the film into something much closer to Snyder’s original vision before he was forced to leave the project during post-production. According to HBO, the film, titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League, will initially be released as a four-part miniseries, followed by a four-hour combined version.
How we got here
It’s been estimated that reworking the visual effects, musical score, and overall editing of Justice League could cost over $30 million, but it’s not hard to see why HBO are interested. The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement kicked off immediately following the release of the original film three years ago, starting with an online petition that gained nearly 180,000 signatures, and it hasn’t seemed to slow down since. Other films have seen similar pushback from fans when they are thought to have been made worse by extensive studio interference, but Justice League in particular seems to have cultivated a fanbase dedicated to seeing the original director’s vision.
In part, this is due to reports that Snyder’s replacement, Joss Whedon, made major changes to the film after Snyder’s departure that radically changed the tone and content of the film. Snyder’s other two projects in the DCEU, Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, have very stylised imagery and tones, and it is clear watching Justice League that the original intention was to continue that motif. However, following Whedon’s changes, the film ended up with a much brighter tone that didn’t really mesh with what preceded it. That muddled feeling and inconsistent approach to the project ultimately led to poor reviews and box office numbers, garnering the film a 40% critical consensus rating on Rotten Tomatoes that fans blamed largely on Whedon’s interference.
One of the other primary reasons fans have been so vocal about the release of a Snyder cut is based on Snyder’s unwilling, late-stage departure from the project. Snyder stepped down in May 2017 following the tragic death of his daughter, at which point the film was already in post-production and the vast majority of the work had been completed. Understandably, a lot of people have wanted him to be given the chance to finally complete the project he had worked so hard on before he and his family suffered such a monumental loss. And, as much as I have very little hope for Zack Snyder’s Justice League turning out as a good film, it is genuinely touching to see fans fight for that and for him to be given that opportunity.
Such a strong push from fans combined with HBO searching for high-impact content to help launch their new streaming service, it’s a simple two birds, one stone scenario and thus, Zack Snyder’s Justice League will be arriving sometime next year.
The death and life of the DCEU
Following the lighting-in-a-bottle success of the first Marvel films in the 2000s and early 2010s, it was no real surprise when Warner Bros announced that they were launching their own cinematic universe based on the superheroes of DC Comics, stylised as the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). The project was launched in 2013 with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and immediately warning bells started to sound. The film was considered a success, grossing $668 million worldwide and becoming the highest grossing Superman solo film ever made, but the critical reception was very poor. Some reviews criticised lead actor Henry Cavill’s performance as being stiff and unlikeable, while others took aim at the lacklustre story, gritty colour grading, and overall grim tone that wore away any sense of joy from the proceedings.
Regardless of the negative press, the film’s commercial success meant that the sequel, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was greenlit, and arrived in cinemas in 2016. The film’s opening weekend was another substantial victory, with the fifth-biggest opening of all time, but it was immediately followed by one of the biggest Friday-to-Friday drop offs ever seen, with an 81.2% decline in sales as negative reviews abounded. The critical and commercial response was so severe, that Warner Bros Pictures spun out a new subsidiary, DC Films, to try to course-correct the spiralling DCEU in the hopes of preventing future failures.
The backlash also led to a significant tonal shift in the upcoming Suicide Squad, which was still in early production, to combat complaints that Batman v Superman had been too sombre. Sadly, those efforts were ultimately in vain and Suicide Squad was panned by critics.
It is important to note that while both of Zack Snyder’s DCEU films had received, at best, mixed reviews, they both still turned a profit, and not a small one at that. The general consensus that the films valued style over substance, or suffered from very poor scripts hadn’t stopped people from coming out to see them, and so Warner Bros Pictures – or rather, DC Films – had no real reason to try to shake up the formula. In other branches of the company, films like Wonder Woman and, later, Shazam! were becoming critical darlings and there was still a palpable hype surrounding the upcoming Justice League despite the problems of the films that had come before it.
| Film | Critical Consensus | Audience Rating |
| Man of Steel | 56% | 75% |
| Batman v Superman | 28% | 62% |
| Suicide Squad | 27% | 59% |
| Wonder Woman | 93% | 87% |
| Justice League | 40% | 71% |
| Aquaman | 65% | 74% |
| Shazam! | 90% | 82% |
| Birds of Prey | 78% | 78% |
Thus, Zack Snyder was given the go ahead to produce Justice League as he had originally planned when helping to lay out the groundwork of the DCEU. And, predictably, it bombed.
Considered to be one of the most expensive films ever made with an estimated production budget of $300 million, the film ultimately led to Warner Bros Pictures losing around $60 million. As with the previous films, reviews criticised the film’s plot and writing, while this time also taking particular aim at the overuse of poor special effects for both fight scenes and the main antagonist. It also suffered from the aforementioned tonal dissonance from the previous Snyder films, and its own internal flip flopping between Joss Whedon’s light humour and the dark gritty reality cultivated by Snyder. Overall, it was a mess and by that point, audiences had learned to trust the early reviewers when they warned them not to bother shelling out for a cinema ticket.
DC Films chalked the failure up to inherent problems in ensemble productions, and announced that they were switching their focus to more character driven, single protagonist projects. It’s a plan they’ve stuck to; of the eleven films that have either come out since Justice League or are planned for release in the next two years, only one, The Suicide Squad, is an ensemble story.
Saving the Justice League
With the nature of Zack Snyder’s departure from Justice League in 2017 and how poorly the film was received, it is easy why fans are so keen for him to return. At the end of the day, as much as endless critics have written countless articles decrying Snyder’s efforts in the DCEU, no one enjoys watching a bad film, particularly one that includes so many beloved characters, and it can be very tempting to think that this is a problem that has an easy fix. After all, this film has been the central goal of Snyder’s plans for the DCEU from the beginning and maybe, just maybe, his version of Justice League would have seen the trilogy finally come together into cohesive, good cinema.
The problem is that it just isn’t going to happen. Zack Snyder is undoubtedly a talented director, and his projects, which have almost all dealt with comic adaptations, are dripping in style and atmosphere. The unfortunate truth is that his approach to filmmaking simply hasn’t worked within the confines of the DCEU, as evidenced by the diminishing returns his films saw. It may be easy to pin Justice League’s failure on Joss Whedon, but the declining quality and interest in these films was already apparent in Batman v Superman, and when that’s only the second entry in a series, it should be a serious concern to a film studio.
The heart of the issue lies in Snyder’s approach to the stories themselves. Comic books are, almost without exception, not really about thrilling battles, or intricate stories – although they have them in spades – but are instead focused on the characters themselves. Batman didn’t become popular all the way back in 1939 because he was involved in a cosmic pitched battle against a CGI warlord from the far end of the universe – when there were only 3 comics being published a year, the idea of having a continuous story arc just wasn’t possible. Instead, readers came back because they were interested in the character of Batman and the hijinks he and Robin would get up to as they solved crimes together. The comics didn’t rely on spectacle or aesthetic because they didn’t have the budget or the medium to do it; they just told compelling, character-driven stories.
Cut to 2017’s Justice League, which features six superheroes, only one of whom has had their own solo film and three of whom who haven’t appeared in any previous instalments of the DCEU outside of cameos. Likewise, the team end up facing off against an enemy we haven’t seen or heard of before, who is chasing after artefacts which also have never made an appearance. For a film that is adapted from a medium that relies on being character-driven, this is an utterly baffling approach.
Rumours about Zack Snyder’s Justice League imply that this problem is going to be ‘fixed’ by reintroducing previously-planned backstory segments for the new characters, but stopping a film dead to explain the history of one of your main protagonists because you didn’t do it earlier is not a solution to this problem. And since it is likely the addition of these scenes that is bloating the runtime to four hours, it’s all but an admission that there was too much ground for this film to ever cover comfortably.
This isn’t a flaw that can be laid solely at Zack Snyder’s feet. While he has clearly been one of the main guiding forces on the early plans for the DCEU, the decisions for which films get greenlit and funded are ultimately the responsibility of the studio itself. That being said, it was still his directorial decision to spend almost all of the first two films of the trilogy establishing the tone of the series rather than getting invested in the actual characters supposedly driving the story on. To give it its due, Man of Steel does try to do this, showing Superman’s backstory and family, and giving us a reason to root for him when the antagonists show up. Coincidentally, it’s also widely considered to be the best film of the three.
Compounding the issue of poor characterisation is that the film’s script is genuinely terrible. One thing critics have repeatedly hounded these films for is their lacklustre – and at times just plain bad – writing, and Justice League falls straight into that same trap. There are countless exchanges that are evidently supposed to sound deep and meaningful but really come off as entirely meaningless and make the characters feel written instead of real.
A prime example of this is an exchange between Cyborg and his father, wherein Victor mentions a monster and Silas assumes he is talking about himself. When he tells him that he isn’t a monster, Victor responds, ‘It’s weird that you thought I meant me.’ The scene frames it as a gotcha moment of clever writing, complete with a cinematic close up of Victor turning his head to reveal the metal plating across his face. Except, no, it’s not weird at all, because the entire conversation up until that point had been about Victor trying to adapt to his new life following the accident that turned him into a cyborg. The scene is written and shot as a dramatic character moment, but none of it matters because the characters don’t act like real people and we’re given no reason to care about them because they’re so paper thin.
This has been a critical flaw throughout all three of Zack Snyder’s DCEU films – and some of his previous projects too – so it’s safe to assume that his cut of Justice League isn’t going to suddenly fix it. His focus has always been on making the characters look as good as possible, rather than working to craft them into good characters. Regardless of any backstory he might add, we’ve seen enough of his work in the DCEU to know that it isn’t going to be enough to patch over the multitude of problems his approach has in this kind of a story.
Ultimately, Justice League’s problem was not down to an unclear tone or wild fluctuations between gritty reality and quirky humour – it was that, just as critics said about Man of Steel and Batman v Superman before it, the film is the epitome of style over substance. Filled with beautiful, carefully framed shots and dialogue that is very good at sounding as though it means something, the truth is that it has absolutely nothing solid to hold it up: no character development, no real sense of threat, and no reason to care about anything that happens. Instead, we’re left with what only really amounts to a series of pretty pictures, and when this film contains six of some of the best known superheroes on the planet, that is a crying shame.
To be clear, I hope I am wrong about all of this. As someone who loves comics and comic book movies, I would like nothing more than to sit down to watch Zack Snyder’s Justice League and be blown away by how brilliant it is. My concern is that fans are placing their hopes in this rerelease as though the problems with the film were solely the creation of Joss Whedon and studio execs who weren’t fully behind Snyder’s vision, when the truth is we were seeing the exact same problems way back in 2013. I want the DCEU to be a success and to continue to grow – Wonder Woman and Shazam! are both excellent films and I am glad that Warner Bros Pictures felt they were worth making.
But maybe we also need to accept that despite any changes Whedon might have made, Zack Snyder still had a significant hand in the core reasons that Justice League failed and, perhaps, he isn’t going to be the person that saves it.
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