‘Justice League’ comes back stronger as a fourhour epic on HBO Max.
Fourhour cut answers demand from fans — and from streaming services
Anyone — and anything — that’s killed in comic books can, and usually does, come back to life.
The same can now be said about comic book movies.
“Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” a fourhour cut of the original director’s DC superhero epic, premieres on HBO Max on Thursday, March 18. It’s an expanded version of the disappointing, twohourlong “Justice League” movie that Warner Bros. released to theaters in November 2017.
Zack Snyder, who had overseen the studio’s DC Extended Universe launch with 2013’s “Man of Steel” and the 2016 “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” was the credited director of the 2017 “Justice League” movie, though it was wellknown that Joss Whedon, who had helmed the first two “Avengers” films for Disney’s rival Marvel Cinematic Universe, extensively rewrote, reshot and took over the editing of the theatrical release.
“When we left the movie, it was a hard time for us,” Snyder recalled during a video interview with The Chronicle from Los Angeles.
Zack Snyder and his producer, wife Deborah Snyder, quit the DC project in 2017 after constant battles with the studio over his dark, characterbased take on the material. Besides featuring the previously introduced superheroes played by Ben Affleck (Batman), Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) and Henry Cavill (Superman), the film would be audiences’ first real introduction to Jason Momoa’s Aquaman, Ezra Miller’s teenage Flash and Ray Fisher’s troubled Cyborg.
But the suicide of Zack’s adopted 20yearold daughter, Autumn, that March took whatever fight they had left out of the couple.
Fortunately, he exited with a blackandwhite rough cut of everything he’d shot on his laptop. As fans got wind of its existence over the years, an increasingly noisy #ReleaseTheSnyderCut
movement grew. Of course, Warner Bros. had no good reason to bankroll a new version of “Justice League,” which never broke even, until its streaming service, HBO Max, came along.
“In the streaming world, we’re used to having longer content. People can bingewatch it or watch it in parts, and they can get all of that character development,” Deborah Snyder said. “So without HBO Max, this vision wouldn’t be possible.”
Zack Snyder realized that his fourhour reshape would need more than 2,600 new visual effects shots to work. Fortunately, most of that labor could be done remotely, as would the required composing and recording of Thomas “Junkie XL” Holkenborg’s completely different score. There were only three days of additional live shooting, all of them for a postapocalyptic epilogue sequence — which, as fans were excited to discover via a recent teaser, brought Jared Leto’s Joker into the drama.
Expanded sequences include much grander battles between the Amazons and ancient Atlanteans against bad guy Steppenwolf ’s (Ciaran Hinds) alien parademon army; a bigger, differently pitched final confrontation; and the appearance of Steppenwolf ’s boss, Darkseid, DC’s rough equivalent to Marvel’s cosmic supervil
lain, Thanos.
Many other surprises await. And they and all the characters have much more to them than they did four years ago.
Zack Snyder estimated that around 11 shots from the theatrical release remain in his version. Alternate takes were used for a lot of the sequences that appear in both cuts, while whole scenes from the previous version have been eliminated.
Both Snyders laughed when asked if there was any of Whedon’s footage left in their four hours — Zack said he still hasn’t seen the 2017 movie, though Deborah watched it.
“It’s not just about the shots that are not in the cut,” she said. “Just tonally, there’s a difference overall. The takes that were chosen, the music is very heroic and epic, the visual effects shots — the film has a completely different look and feel.
The cumulative effect is that it is such a different animal, it’s almost unfair to really compare them.”
Though they wouldn’t reveal how much all this cost, Zack Snyder recently told Vanity Fair that HBO Max spent around $70 million last year on the new elements for the film. Neither of the Snyders took a salary, and Zack repeatedly mentioned how important it’s been to them that fans not only lobbied for the “Snyder cut” but also raised money for mental health services in honor of Autumn, to whom the new version is dedicated.
It’s undeniably a triumphant return for the Snyders. Some of the Warner Bros. executives they clashed with have left the conglomerate since. In former CEO Kevin Tsujihara’s case, it was over a sex scandal. Whedon, too, is under attack for alleged abusive behavior from members of his “Buffy the Vampire
Slayer” series cast and Fisher, who’s still in conflict with Warner Bros. over issues stemming from Whedon’s treatment of him on the “Justice League” set.
But gloating isn’t on the Snyders’ minds.
“I feel like it is fun to finish this movie. There’s no two ways about it,” Zack Snyder said.
The Snyders have moved on to Netflix, where their zombie movie “Army of the Dead” is scheduled to drop on May 21 and they’re building a universe of adjacent series and films. Yet that “Snyder cut” extended epilogue sets up loads of intriguing new possibilities for the DCEU, including introducing beloved comic book characters and hinting that Darkseid’s threat to the planet has barely begun.
Could the onetime master of Earth’s secondfavorite comic book movie franchise return again?
“Warner Bros. has publicly stated that the theatrical version of ‘Justice League’ is canon for the DCEU,” Zack Snyder said, with a slight chuckle. “So this is an elseworld experiment, and we’re really happy with that. The truth is, we’re pretty busy now, finishing ‘Army’ and I’m writing another movie for Netflix. We’ll see what happens.”