On March 18, a four-hour version of director Zack Snyder’s original vision for Justice League will arrive at HBO Max.
The first reviews are full of praise for the film, calling it a victory for fans of Snyder’s other superhero films (Batman x Superman, Steel man) Others acknowledge that, hey, at least it’s better than the original movie released in 2017, which was edited by Joss Whedon after Snyder had to walk away from the project to deal with his daughter’s sudden death. Whether the film meets people’s expectations or not, its very existence – the marketing behind it, what it represents for the fandom as a whole – is a turning point for online fandom.
A quick reminder of what the past four years have consisted of in various corners of the internet: after Justice League released in 2017, Snyder fans immediately accepted a petition asking Warner Bros. to release an alternative version of the film – the real version that they called Snyder’s Court. Over the years, appeals to Warner Bros. acting have grown, as has the fandom. Billboard posters in Times Square, bus ads in San Diego during Comic-Con and small demonstrations outside of Warner Bros. ‘The headquarters in Burbank existed in an attempt to convince WarnerMedia executives to give them the version of Justice League they were promised through configurations in Man of Steel, Batman x Superman, Wonder Woman, and more.
Like any large faceless group focusing their personas online on a particular thing or person, the Snyder Cut fandom (or the collective #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, as they became known) was a mix of positives and negatives. The positives are inspiring. Together, the group raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise awareness about suicide prevention, a cause close to Snyder’s heart after his daughter’s death. A fandom rooted in a specific director spawned some genuinely thoughtful social media campaigns. There is no denying that.
It is also impossible to ignore the negatives. Critics and reporters received numerous death threats and vile slanders, all because they expressed disinterest in a Snyder cut or called Snyder’s other job a bad one. Warner Bros. executives and DC Comics as Geoff Johns and former CEO of Warner Bros. Kevin Tsujihara were criticized by Snyder fans to the point that Johns apparently stopped using Twitter. When the new Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff joined the company, her Twitter mentions were full of people demanding the Snyder cut.
“It took a long time for them, the people who really wanted to be productive right now, to realize that they would be judged for [negative] actions too ”, Sean O’Connell, journalist and author of Release the Snyder Cut, a book that details the campaign over the past four years, tells The Verge. “The Snyder movement does not have very strong control over the policing of people in its movement who continue to promote this negativity.”
Even with critics, academics and journalists calling the toxic parts of the fandom, there were some members within the group who just seemed to be encouraged by Snyder’s continued recognition and not at all subtle encouragement. The director recently said THE New York Times that “in some ways it’s fun to ride the wave of a cultural phenomenon”, adding that “in other ways it’s terrifying and horrible”.
Snyder Cut fans are far from being the only fan base with a toxic cloud hovering over their parts. Star Wars it is a perfect example. The last Jedi director Rian Johnson, alongside actors John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran, received hordes of harassment from the bitter Star Wars viewers. Boyega and Johnson fought publicly against trolls, while Tran decided after some time to leave social media platforms like Instagram for his own mental health. At the time, Lucasfilm executives said nothing publicly, nor did any of the officers Star Wars social media accounts.
One of the biggest changes that has taken place in a world that prioritizes the Internet and dominates social media is that fans of large properties feel closer to talent, executives and companies than ever before. In turn, companies are trying to figure out how to navigate extremely loud voices on increasingly global platforms. Universal relied on the hashtag #JusticeForHan when marketing its next F9, a popular fan-driven movement. Sony reworked the overall tone for Poison after the first trailer failed to garner hype from Marvel fans. And perhaps most notably, Paramount completely redesigned its CGI version of Sonic the Hedgehog after the first trailer led to an immediate negative reaction from fans.
Parts of the Snyder Cut fandom drew direct comparisons to what happened with BioWare Mass Effect 3 in 2012. After the end of the game drew a lot of criticism from fans, BioWare launched an alternative ending to try to soften a vocal part of the fan base. The DLC was called Mass effect: extended cut, and became an example of corporations giving in to social media pressures.
“It’s such a slippery slope,” says O’Connell. “I don’t think studios and corporations are going to make decisions to placate fans on social media because it’s a risky bet. At the same time, this whole DCEU experiment, for me, was reactionary to the detriment of the studio. They started chasing the Marvel model instead of just believing whatever Nolan had started and what Snyder was trying to continue. “
AT&T has undoubtedly leaned more towards Snyder’s fandom as it tries to attract more attention and subscribers to its new streaming service HBO Max. After years of Warner Bros. repeatedly saying nothing about re-launching a movie version in theaters, Snyder’s ad Justice League at HBO, Max came with AT&T official Twitter account celebrating a thorny fandom. That didn’t stop other Snyder fans from responding to other AT&T tweets with appeals to #RestoreTheSnyderUniverse, demanding that the director have another chance to create his entire world of superheroes, something that current DC Films boss Walter Hamada, has no intention of doing.
The Snyder Cut is, according to several analyzes, much better than the original. It is proof that a director accompanies the entire project, from start to finish. But #ReleaseTheSnyderCut is not the same as that of Zack Snyder Justice League, and there is a reason why WarnerMedia is launching it as a four-hour movie without effective supervision on HBO Max instead of re-launching it in theaters (even with the pandemic) and spending $ 100 million on marketing.
Yeah, like Snyder said THE New York Times, a “social experiment”. The problem with an experiment is that no one knows what that means two years, five years or three decades from now. O’Connell does not believe this would have happened if Warner Bros. had waited another year or HBO Max had not been launched. It is a time to appease fans and take subscribers to a platform that WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar always refers to as the company’s future.
“It is the culmination of this whole experience: I fought and used the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, and it is in my world, on my computer, on my TV, at my home,” said Snyder.
This is Zack Snyder Justice League. The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fandom will not suddenly disappear, as my colleague Joshua Rivera wrote in Polygon. Both for the positive activists who are happy to finally have Snyder’s version available to watch and for the negative trolls who can claim victory on social media and continue fighting with people, they got what they wanted. Their tactics worked. One of the largest corporations in the United States gave in to the demands of anonymous people. This is not something that people forget and it just encourages even more a very specific type of action.