Zack Snyder’s JUSTICE LEAGUE Gets Justice For Filmmakers
The history of Hollywood is littered with people who have been chewed up and spit out by the dream factory. Films have been written, shot and edited, only to have the wonderful minds behind them cut out of the final stages. Heck, directors have even been removed from projects before they could even wrap principal photography. In the end, many of these mangled projects go down in legend as “the films that might have been.”
One only has to look at a list like Ridley Scott on Blade Runner; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; Richard Stanley’s The Island of Doctor Moreau; Paul Schrader’s The Exorcist: Dominion; and Orson Welles on just about anything, to realize that $tudio/creative tug-of-war is an all too frequent occurrence in the film industry. While some “interrupted” films ultimately get salvaged and turn out to be classics, others have been forgotten in the mists of time.
However, Zack Snyder seems to have turned this around with Zack Snyder’s Justice League – set to arrive on HBO Max on 18 March 2021
The release of The Snyder Cut comes after the disappoint and ultimate failure of Justice League in November 2017. to the launch of the now infamous #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag as well as a change.org petition which garnered 100,000 signatures.
Snyder delivered his first 4-hour rough cut of the Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice follow-up in January 2017, however Warner Bros. wanted a cut of the film somewhere in the two-hour range. Snyder delivered another version running 2 hour 20-minutes but that cut needed finessed. Snyder was unable to complete this after the death of his daughter and Joss Whedon was brought in to reshoot and recut the film. This led to a myriad of inconsistencies ad imperfections – the biggest of which was Moustachegate (Henry Cavill needed to reshoot scenes as Superman during the production of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, but his character had a moustache in that film. The facial hair was digitally removed for the DC Comics pic at a cost of millions).
In November 2019 Snyder began liaising with Warner Bros, in an attempt to bring his finished vision to the screen and the studio cut him a cheque in the region of $50 million to complete his version (a 4 hour cut) of the film. Nobody has ever been given that sort of cash to complete a film which has already been released.
Now, finally comes the opportunity where we all get to see what Zack Snyder originally intended Justice League to be…
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