We’re still a few weeks away from the debut of the much-awaited “Snyder cut” of Justice League, which was supposed to be the DCEU’s splashy, money-gobbling equivalent of Marvel’s The Avengers. It wasn’t. It did okay, but it also dramatically underperformed, and earned middling reviews to boot. But there’s one person who has no opinion on it because he’s never seen it: original director Zack Snyder.
A new, sprawling Vanity Fair piece about the film’s chaotic making has a lot of never-before-revealed nuggets, among them that there was almost a romantic subplot involving Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Amy Adams’ Lois Lane. (As if Batman and Superman both having mothers named Martha wasn’t enough.) But one of the juicier bits involves how Warner brass reacted to seeing the version of the film handed to them by Joss Whedon, who took over from Snyder after family issues forced him to prematurely step aside.
“When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” a Warner Bros. executive told VF. “Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of s*it it was.”
Another person who saw it was Deborah Snyder, Zack’s producing partner and wife, who watched it alongside executive producer Christopher Nolan. “They came and they just said, ‘You can never see that movie,’” Zack recalled. And so he hasn’t!
Zack Snyder also revealed some of the issues that cropped up before tragedy forced him to leave the production. Among the aforementioned nixing of the Bats-Lois romance, Warner Bros. also told him to keep it relatively short.
“How am I supposed to introduce six characters and an alien with potential for world domination in two hours?” Snyder told VF. “I mean, I can do it, it can be done. Clearly it was done. But I didn’t see it.”
But good things come to those who wait, and so, almost 3 ½ years after Whedon’s Justice League bowed to a profoundly meh reception, HBO Max subscribers will be able to see a cut of the film that’s twice that length. It drops starting March 18.
(Via Vanity Fair)
