Shortly after Zack Snyder made the groundbreaking announcement that Warner Bros. had signed off on “releasing the Snyder cut,” the original version of the film he intended to make before a family tragedy forced him to step away, there was talk of the mammoth project possibly being released as a six-chapter miniseries when it finally hit HBO Max. Even from the jump, there was no confusion that the Snyder Cut would have a seriously long runtime, so it made sense that Snyder and HBO would go the limited series route. But then that talk just sort of went away, and before fans knew it, a four-hour-long film was barreling down the pipe.
In a new and candid interview, Snyder didn’t shy away from what happened behind the scenes that led to his director’s cut pivoting away from a miniseries release, and it’s a tale as old time: The lawyers got involved. Via Deadline:
Frankly, I think that there was some legal rumbling about the dividing up of a movie into four parts, and does it become a TV show, and does it void all the contracts. And I was like, look, guys, I don’t want to become…this sounds like we’re going to get in the weeds on this, and it’s a disaster, so let’s just not make legal precedent out of this movie, and I’ll just stick to my four-hour opus.
To Snyder’s credit, the four-hour-long approach doesn’t seem to have hurt the film. Despite the gargantuan runtime, critics have praised Zack Snyder’s Justice League as a significant improvement over the theatrical version that Whedon delivered in 2017.
(Via Deadline)
