Justice is served
Should we be excited about Zack Snyder’s 4-hour Justice League?
‘PERHAPS THE SNYDER CUT WILL OPEN DOORS FOR OTHER LOST VISIONS’
In May came the news DCEU fans had been waiting for since November 2017, when Justice League landed in multiplexes not with a kick-ass superhero pose but a spectacular faceplant: the Snyder Cut is getting a release! Well, after spending over $20m on cutting, scoring and effects work, that is – it’s set to debut on HBO Max at some point in 2021.
After directing Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, Zack Snyder was in post-production on superhero squad movie Justice League when a family tragedy required him to step away. Warner Bros hired Joss Whedon to finish the film, reshot and retooled to lighten the tone. It made sense at the time; Wonder Woman had stepped out of the DCEU’s shadow to become a critical and commercial smash, and Whedon had scored big (laughs) with Avengers Assemble. But in retrospect it made no sense – Justice League received dire notices and took $658m at the box office, a small return for such a supersized endeavour.
Safe to say, fans were pissed off. #ReleaseTheSnyderCut became the
most tweeted hashtag about any WB film, and a petition attracted 130,000 signatures within a week of Justice League’s release. Hell, Zack’s zealots even hired a billboard in Times Square and chartered a plane to trail a banner over Comic-Con, while Snyder kept the flame alive by dropping concept art, leaked footage and cryptic comments on Vero.
Perhaps rewarding the fans’ persistent campaign, which at times tipped from admirable passion (raising over $150,000 for suicide-prevention charities) into toxicity (online harassment), is a bad thing, and there’s no guarantee the Snyder Cut will be a significant improvement. But Teasers will certainly watch the new edit with interest, for ‘Josstice League’, as Whedon’s cut became known, apparently only features about a quarter of Snyder’s original material, and the lengthy Snyder Cut is rumoured to include Darkseid, Martian Manhunter and the sight of Steppenwolf being first impaled by Aquaman’s trident and then decapitated by Wonder Woman.
Who knows, perhaps the Snyder Cut will open doors for other lost visions? And no, we don’t mean David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, but rather something like Martin Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York before Harvey Weinstein took his scissors to it. #ReleaseTheMartyCut starts here. JG