Murmurs of a “Snyder Cut” by Justice League spread through social networks from the minute the 2017 version came in and out of theaters. Zack Snyder was behind most of the hype, provoking what his expanded version might look like for everything from press rounds to Batman v Superman: Ultimate Edition to your Vero account. His cut of the film, the real film, was four hours long and had a lot of backstory for Cyborg, Flash, Steppenwolf and even Darkseid, who didn’t even appear at launch Justice League. Like its heroes, Snyder’s cut became a mythical entity – only to be fully realized throughout 2020 by HBO Max, hungry for content, a $ 70 million budget increase and a half-year pandemic crisis for several visual effects locations.
Zack Snyder’s four-hour version of Justice League it is now a Real Thing, available for perpetual broadcast on HBO Max. But over the years of mythification and a struggle to bring it to the small screen, one question remained: what would the version of Snyder have been like if it had hit theaters in 2017?
“We didn’t intend to make a three-hour movie,” producer Deborah Snyder told Polygon. “I think, however, with Zack’s films, we have a story of theatrical release and then, look at watchmakers – we had two other versions of this film on DVD, one of which lasted more than three hours. “
Much of the drama around Justice League focuses on the consequences of the director’s departure, when the screenwriter and director Joss Whedon intervened to reshape the story – mainly by cutting deviations focused on the character, as we now know – and to remake the final act of the film. But the genesis of Justice League it was just as turbulent, and even now it’s hard to imagine what kind of film Snyder could have sculpted with his original vision. Snyder said in the past that the original drafts he wrote with Chris Terrio (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) were much darker than what viewers got this week Zack Snyder’s Justice League. But writing Justice League during post-production in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, then preparing for massive filming in the immediate weeks after the film’s polarizing release, made the epic-sized sequel a challenge before a single frame was shot.
“It was a huge script and a little bit different,” says Deborah Snyder. “I think we would have liked a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and the studio really wanted a two-hour movie at the time, which didn’t make a lot of sense when you have an entire Justice League team that you’re trying to develop and put together . ”
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Image: HBO Max
Warm reception for BvS prompted Warner Bros. to request changes to the dark script that Zack Snyder and Terrio had devised. But even so, the scope was enormous – the film, Deborah Snyder says, ran for almost 140 days (and new scenes for Snyder’s cut took just three additional days). “So it was quite intense. I think it was a sign of the journey that this film would actually take for the audience. “
Zack Snyder rejected the idea that the four-hour version of his film was a “montage cut,” or the cruder version of a complete film with very few editorial excisions. According a tweet as of December 2019, its assembly cut was almost five hours long. The four-hour version was the real sight – but not from the start. But with the luxury of infinite streaming space and mythology revolving around the Snyder Cut, the most interesting film was no longer the one that needed to be delivered. Deborah Snyder says that the advent of HBO Max kept all the rules off the table.
“It’s the best scenario,” she says. “You can watch it in full or in parts, if you want. [HBO Max] made it very easy to pause at each party, so you can go back and see your favorite things. It also made it possible for that to happen. “
So now, a new question arises: Is there any part of the Justice League left on the cutting room floor?
“I think not!” the producer says, with a glimpse of triumph. But it is not entirely the film they planned to make in 2017. During production, their daughter would die by suicide, increasing the couple’s motivation to eventually move away from the remake process. Over the years, the country itself would experience major upheavals. ONE Justice League released in 2021, Deborah says, it couldn’t be the same as one released in 2017, even if it was just Zack Snyder’s creation.
“The film resonates differently,” says Deborah Snyder. “Our loss and our journey shaped the film as well. It has become a personal journey on many levels. But when you look at the struggles that some of these characters go through, and you look at the times that we’re living in now … I think it’s better when these characters are a mirror of ourselves in some way. We will not necessarily have these superpowers, but their struggles, we can relate to them. ”