They can run different storylines and different universes whether they kill the villains or not.
Justice League MOVIE Discussion (The SynderCut Drops 3/18/2021)
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They can run different storylines and different universes whether they kill the villains or not.
He had ww3 with zod.. it was obvious you suppose to go with a villain on the same level as zod or greater to try to top the carnage.. once Batman was announced it was like there goes that idea.. you knew the movie wasn’t going to be on zod and crew level.. shouldve kept Batman on ice and brought in bizzaro or some shit.. turn zod into bizzaro anything but batman
Ummm...did you actually watch the movie? He died fighting Doomsday (genetically modified from Zod) at the end!
Yeah I saw the wack movie.. doomsday was treated like venom in Spider-Man 3.. had a 10-15 min part and that was it.. he wasn’t the main bad guy throughout movie just a filler..notice most people hate Spider-Man 3 cause of that.. the movie was mostly about bats and supes.. than you had the crappy save Martha thing.. you pretty much wanted to end.. Wonder Woman had an appearance to but did you really care about her presence or say it was memorable? Movie was trash.. should of been a man of steel sequel without any of those motherfuckers period.. the bat vs supes fight was trash
think joker, winter soldier, thanos that’s how a villain suppose to make his presence felt
The Joker actually says the words “we live in a society” in the full-length official trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, also known as the Snyder Cut. Snyder is clearly in dialogue with his extremely internet, very gamer fans, and he’s giving them everything they want. As a Valentine to them or something, HBO Max released the trailer on February 14, and this directorial cut of the film definitely appears to scrub all quippy, hokey signs of uncredited reshoot director Joss Whedon out of the picture. The trailer is backed by Gregorian chants, which is the most capital-S serious music there is, and characters say things like “the god is dead” and “if you can’t bring down the charging bull, don’t wave the red cape at it.” If you couldn’t guess, they’re talking about Superman (Henry Cavill), who has left destruction in his wake after Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was five years ago now. Justice League (
‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ Actor Harry Lennix on Playing Martian Manhunter and the Joss Whedon Scandal
By Adam B. Vary
variety.com
When Harry Lennix first signed up to appear in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Superman film “Man of Steel,” he thought he was playing General Swanwick, the U.S. military’s primary point of contact with Henry Cavill’s Kryptonian superhero. In Snyder’s follow-up, 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Lennix returned as Swanwick, who’d been promoted to Secretary of Defense.
It wasn’t until Oct. 2019, however, that Lennix learned Snyder’s real intention was to reveal in 2017’s “Justice League” that Swanwick was actually J’onn J’onzz, a.k.a. the fan-favorite DC superhero — and eventual Justice League member — known as the Martian Manhunter. In the comics, J’onn is the last surviving member of his species; his abilities to change his appearance (normally, he’s green, bald, and has red eyes) have allowed him to live as a human on Earth.
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In a series of social media posts, Snyder revealed storyboards for a scene between Martha Kent (Diane Lane) and Lois Lane (Amy Adams) that ended with Martha transforming into J’onn — and then into Swanwick. “I was able to shoot all of it except for the Harry Lennix side,” Snyder wrote. “Was my intention to do that in LA.”
That shoot, of course, never materialized: Snyder left “Justice League” in the spring of 2017 and was replaced by Joss Whedon, and much of Snyder’s vision for the film — including Martian Manhunter — was cut out. After a massive grassroots campaign to #ReleasetheSnyderCut, however, WarnerMedia announced last May that Snyder was reconstructing his version of the movie into a four-hour epic. Over the summer, Lennix finally was able to shoot his side of Martian Manhunter’s introduction, using motion capture to embody J’onn’s massive green frame.
It’s the first time Martian Manhunter will appear in a live-action feature (David Harewood plays the role in the CW series “Supergirl”), and with “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” finally set for release on HBO Max on March 18, Variety reached out to Lennix to ask him about his unusual journey to the role.
Lennix is a busy guy: He’s currently shooting the eighth season of NBC’s “The Blacklist,” and in December, he announced plans to create the the Lillian Marcie Center and African American Museum of the Performing Arts in the South Side of Chicago. He’s worked for over 30 years as an actor — he’s set to voice a role in Snyder’s upcoming animated Netflix series “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas” — including two seasons on Whedon’s 2009-2010 Fox TV series “Dollhouse.”
So when Variety asked the 56-year-old to comment on the allegations by Ray Fisher that Whedon engaged in “abusive” and “unprofessional” behavior while working on “Justice League,” Lennix had a few things to say.
Did you first learn that Zack Snyder wanted to make Swanwick become Martian Manhunter when he posted that storyboard of the character in Oct. 2019?
I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I found out. I don’t think there was any sort of advanced word. There are a lot of people who intuited it somehow, like fans bouncing that idea around. So I don’t know if somebody knew about it outside of Zack before that. But I did not know until I saw that storyboard.
So Zack didn’t give you any indication before he dropped that news?
No, he did not. From time to time, you know, Zack will text me things or email me things. I’ve certainly done projects with him, such as “Army of the Dead,” and I knew that was coming. But he likes to surprise me, and I think I’m not unique in that way. But, you know, there was no time that I could have found out about it that would have been a happier time.
After he dropped that news, did he call you to say, “Oh hey, by the way, I was gonna do this”?
No. The next call that I had from Zack was, “Hey, when can you come in and shoot?” So that was great. I found out that it was a possibility, or at least that Martian Manhunter was going to be in it, when he revealed through the storyboard that Martha Kent is coming by visiting Lois, and then after she leaves, she reveals herself to be, in fact, Calvin Swanwick, or the Martian Manhunter. That’s how I knew about it.
There’s a moment in “Man of Steel” where Swanwick asks Superman why he won’t reveal his identity as an alien that now feels very pointed in a way that obviously you hadn’t intended.
Yes, that’s true. And I think to some extent, that is what has sort of started the speculation [about Martian Manhunter], that Swanwick didn’t shrink away after Superman rather nonchalantly takes his handcuffs off and walks up to the window. This is now getting on to about nine years ago that we shot that scene. I think I asked Zack the question, “Am I going to shrink back here?” Because I’m a general, I’ve obviously faced danger.
And, he said, “No, in fact, you stand your ground, maybe even you move forward a little.” Perhaps that’s what got those wheels turning, that at least gave the suggestion that that might be a plausible reveal.
How much did you know about the character of Martian Manhunter before this became a thing?
Not much at all. I only knew that there was such a character. I’d heard through the fans of the DCEU that there were a couple of members of the Justice League that were not represented in the movie, and vaguely that one of those people was Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz. I didn’t know much about him at all.
How much do you think that he’s going to be in the movie?
I don’t know what’s going to be left on the floor, if any, but I didn’t shoot an inordinate amount. My work is not central, as it were, to the movie. It may be to a plot point. But I don’t think you’ll start talking about that character more than, say, Superman.
You said elsewhere that you would love for there to be a Martian Manhunter movie. Have you heard anything at all from Warner Bros. on that on that front?
Not one thing. I haven’t heard anything moved that needle toward an actuality. But why not?!
The reason there’s a Snyder Cut is because Zack was replaced by Joss Whedon on the movie. As you know, Ray Fisher has alleged that Joss engaged in misconduct during the shoot. You worked with Joss on two seasons of “Dollhouse,” so I wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on the matter?
I wasn’t there during the time in question. I am sorry that anybody had to experience what it was that was described. Obviously, there’s one side of the story that we’ve heard. I don’t know that Joss has made any comments. As you point out, I worked with Joss fairly closely for a couple of years there. I didn’t see that behavior, and at the same time, as an actor, my heart goes out to anybody that had to endure that kind of treatment. We get treated as a second-class citizens frequently. But I did not see it, and I would be curious as to what [Joss’s] response to this has been.
I just hope everybody can move on with their lives, to be honest with you. As a former seminarian, and as somebody who has made mistakes, I’ve been on either side of that equation. Directors sometimes are insensitive to the needs or the feelings of actors, and sometimes actors are needy, and sometimes they are oversensitive. I know I can be. So that said, I hope whatever it was that happened, that people could move on, and — outside of some unforgivable thing — that people can forgive, not just each other, but forgive themselves. To say, “Look, I may have made this mistake in the past, now I know better, and I’m going to do better.” This was a different time. What was tolerable, five years ago, a year ago, is no longer, and we have to adapt to that. I think there’s some of that going on, that this is generational in some way. I know that Ray has it in himself to be better because of this, to be stronger, to have survived it. And I also hope that Joss can, too, that he can survive it, be the writer and creator that that he is and we can all be better because of it.
You’re looking at this with more empathy than I would say many observers have in light of what Ray has alleged, and what actors on “Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” alleged about Joss on Wednesday. Were you experiences with Joss purely professional?
Yes. Utterly professional. I didn’t see any of that kind of behavior that I’m hearing about. But I’m in a different place. That kind of thing is not likely to happen to me, just cause I’m a big Black guy from the South Side of Chicago, that people are a little more circumspect in however they might think about treating me or talking to me. I think maybe we should give [Joss] another chance to respond, to see what his side of the story is. Not minimizing anybody’s story, not minimizing the experiences others had in any way. But I believe that we must learn to reconcile. And we must learn to move on.
We wouldn’t be able to take this into a court, per se, not really. What I’ve learned over the years is that two people could be telling the absolute truth from their point of view, and disagree on what those salient points are. Whatever those salient points are, I think that everything that I have heard so far — and that’s not everything — is recoverable. And so to the extent that it’s recoverable, let’s recover from it and keep moving.
Joss hasn’t commented, Ray hasn’t gone public with almost any details about what he says happened on “Justice League,” and WarnerMedia hasn’t revealed what the company learned in its investigation. So figuring out how to move forward is complicated in the absence of detail.
I agree, 100%. What I’ve been able to glean from the stories and the back and forth, such as it is — mostly the forth — is that nasty things were said, mean, insensitive things were said, that made certain people uncomfortable. That’s certainly something I’m familiar with actors having to endure. Indeed, that’s part of the process. People say “no” to us for any number of reasons, or tell us to lose weight or gain it or get taller or shorter or younger. That’s just the nature of the business — it’s a personal business. I am of the opinion that this is entirely fixable, and that really what needs to happen is a dialogue. I mean, the old standard in American jurisprudence is you have a right to face your accuser and to respond. I think that people have the right to present both sides of the case. In fact, it’s not just a right, I think it’s an obligation. I wonder what’s going to happen.
By Adam B. Vary
‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ Actor Harry Lennix on Playing Martian Manhunter and the Joss Whedon Scandal
"Zack Snyder's Justice League" actor Harry Lennix talks Martian Manhunter and why he hopes "people can forgive" in the Joss Whedon scandal.
variety.com
When Harry Lennix first signed up to appear in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Superman film “Man of Steel,” he thought he was playing General Swanwick, the U.S. military’s primary point of contact with Henry Cavill’s Kryptonian superhero. In Snyder’s follow-up, 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Lennix returned as Swanwick, who’d been promoted to Secretary of Defense.
It wasn’t until Oct. 2019, however, that Lennix learned Snyder’s real intention was to reveal in 2017’s “Justice League” that Swanwick was actually J’onn J’onzz, a.k.a. the fan-favorite DC superhero — and eventual Justice League member — known as the Martian Manhunter. In the comics, J’onn is the last surviving member of his species; his abilities to change his appearance (normally, he’s green, bald, and has red eyes) have allowed him to live as a human on Earth.
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In a series of social media posts, Snyder revealed storyboards for a scene between Martha Kent (Diane Lane) and Lois Lane (Amy Adams) that ended with Martha transforming into J’onn — and then into Swanwick. “I was able to shoot all of it except for the Harry Lennix side,” Snyder wrote. “Was my intention to do that in LA.”
That shoot, of course, never materialized: Snyder left “Justice League” in the spring of 2017 and was replaced by Joss Whedon, and much of Snyder’s vision for the film — including Martian Manhunter — was cut out. After a massive grassroots campaign to #ReleasetheSnyderCut, however, WarnerMedia announced last May that Snyder was reconstructing his version of the movie into a four-hour epic. Over the summer, Lennix finally was able to shoot his side of Martian Manhunter’s introduction, using motion capture to embody J’onn’s massive green frame.
It’s the first time Martian Manhunter will appear in a live-action feature (David Harewood plays the role in the CW series “Supergirl”), and with “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” finally set for release on HBO Max on March 18, Variety reached out to Lennix to ask him about his unusual journey to the role.
Lennix is a busy guy: He’s currently shooting the eighth season of NBC’s “The Blacklist,” and in December, he announced plans to create the the Lillian Marcie Center and African American Museum of the Performing Arts in the South Side of Chicago. He’s worked for over 30 years as an actor — he’s set to voice a role in Snyder’s upcoming animated Netflix series “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas” — including two seasons on Whedon’s 2009-2010 Fox TV series “Dollhouse.”
So when Variety asked the 56-year-old to comment on the allegations by Ray Fisher that Whedon engaged in “abusive” and “unprofessional” behavior while working on “Justice League,” Lennix had a few things to say.
Did you first learn that Zack Snyder wanted to make Swanwick become Martian Manhunter when he posted that storyboard of the character in Oct. 2019?
I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I found out. I don’t think there was any sort of advanced word. There are a lot of people who intuited it somehow, like fans bouncing that idea around. So I don’t know if somebody knew about it outside of Zack before that. But I did not know until I saw that storyboard.
So Zack didn’t give you any indication before he dropped that news?
No, he did not. From time to time, you know, Zack will text me things or email me things. I’ve certainly done projects with him, such as “Army of the Dead,” and I knew that was coming. But he likes to surprise me, and I think I’m not unique in that way. But, you know, there was no time that I could have found out about it that would have been a happier time.
After he dropped that news, did he call you to say, “Oh hey, by the way, I was gonna do this”?
No. The next call that I had from Zack was, “Hey, when can you come in and shoot?” So that was great. I found out that it was a possibility, or at least that Martian Manhunter was going to be in it, when he revealed through the storyboard that Martha Kent is coming by visiting Lois, and then after she leaves, she reveals herself to be, in fact, Calvin Swanwick, or the Martian Manhunter. That’s how I knew about it.
There’s a moment in “Man of Steel” where Swanwick asks Superman why he won’t reveal his identity as an alien that now feels very pointed in a way that obviously you hadn’t intended.
Yes, that’s true. And I think to some extent, that is what has sort of started the speculation [about Martian Manhunter], that Swanwick didn’t shrink away after Superman rather nonchalantly takes his handcuffs off and walks up to the window. This is now getting on to about nine years ago that we shot that scene. I think I asked Zack the question, “Am I going to shrink back here?” Because I’m a general, I’ve obviously faced danger.
And, he said, “No, in fact, you stand your ground, maybe even you move forward a little.” Perhaps that’s what got those wheels turning, that at least gave the suggestion that that might be a plausible reveal.
How much did you know about the character of Martian Manhunter before this became a thing?
Not much at all. I only knew that there was such a character. I’d heard through the fans of the DCEU that there were a couple of members of the Justice League that were not represented in the movie, and vaguely that one of those people was Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz. I didn’t know much about him at all.
How much do you think that he’s going to be in the movie?
I don’t know what’s going to be left on the floor, if any, but I didn’t shoot an inordinate amount. My work is not central, as it were, to the movie. It may be to a plot point. But I don’t think you’ll start talking about that character more than, say, Superman.
You said elsewhere that you would love for there to be a Martian Manhunter movie. Have you heard anything at all from Warner Bros. on that on that front?
Not one thing. I haven’t heard anything moved that needle toward an actuality. But why not?!
The reason there’s a Snyder Cut is because Zack was replaced by Joss Whedon on the movie. As you know, Ray Fisher has alleged that Joss engaged in misconduct during the shoot. You worked with Joss on two seasons of “Dollhouse,” so I wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on the matter?
I wasn’t there during the time in question. I am sorry that anybody had to experience what it was that was described. Obviously, there’s one side of the story that we’ve heard. I don’t know that Joss has made any comments. As you point out, I worked with Joss fairly closely for a couple of years there. I didn’t see that behavior, and at the same time, as an actor, my heart goes out to anybody that had to endure that kind of treatment. We get treated as a second-class citizens frequently. But I did not see it, and I would be curious as to what [Joss’s] response to this has been.
I just hope everybody can move on with their lives, to be honest with you. As a former seminarian, and as somebody who has made mistakes, I’ve been on either side of that equation. Directors sometimes are insensitive to the needs or the feelings of actors, and sometimes actors are needy, and sometimes they are oversensitive. I know I can be. So that said, I hope whatever it was that happened, that people could move on, and — outside of some unforgivable thing — that people can forgive, not just each other, but forgive themselves. To say, “Look, I may have made this mistake in the past, now I know better, and I’m going to do better.” This was a different time. What was tolerable, five years ago, a year ago, is no longer, and we have to adapt to that. I think there’s some of that going on, that this is generational in some way. I know that Ray has it in himself to be better because of this, to be stronger, to have survived it. And I also hope that Joss can, too, that he can survive it, be the writer and creator that that he is and we can all be better because of it.
You’re looking at this with more empathy than I would say many observers have in light of what Ray has alleged, and what actors on “Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” alleged about Joss on Wednesday. Were you experiences with Joss purely professional?
Yes. Utterly professional. I didn’t see any of that kind of behavior that I’m hearing about. But I’m in a different place. That kind of thing is not likely to happen to me, just cause I’m a big Black guy from the South Side of Chicago, that people are a little more circumspect in however they might think about treating me or talking to me. I think maybe we should give [Joss] another chance to respond, to see what his side of the story is. Not minimizing anybody’s story, not minimizing the experiences others had in any way. But I believe that we must learn to reconcile. And we must learn to move on.
We wouldn’t be able to take this into a court, per se, not really. What I’ve learned over the years is that two people could be telling the absolute truth from their point of view, and disagree on what those salient points are. Whatever those salient points are, I think that everything that I have heard so far — and that’s not everything — is recoverable. And so to the extent that it’s recoverable, let’s recover from it and keep moving.
Joss hasn’t commented, Ray hasn’t gone public with almost any details about what he says happened on “Justice League,” and WarnerMedia hasn’t revealed what the company learned in its investigation. So figuring out how to move forward is complicated in the absence of detail.
I agree, 100%. What I’ve been able to glean from the stories and the back and forth, such as it is — mostly the forth — is that nasty things were said, mean, insensitive things were said, that made certain people uncomfortable. That’s certainly something I’m familiar with actors having to endure. Indeed, that’s part of the process. People say “no” to us for any number of reasons, or tell us to lose weight or gain it or get taller or shorter or younger. That’s just the nature of the business — it’s a personal business. I am of the opinion that this is entirely fixable, and that really what needs to happen is a dialogue. I mean, the old standard in American jurisprudence is you have a right to face your accuser and to respond. I think that people have the right to present both sides of the case. In fact, it’s not just a right, I think it’s an obligation. I wonder what’s going to happen.
Warner Bros. Executive Slams Joss Whedon’s ‘Justice League’ Cut: ‘Stupefying’ and ‘Piece of Sh*t’
The anonymous executive tells Vanity Fair that nobody at Warner Bros. wanted to admit how horrible Whedon's "Justice League" came out.
www.indiewire.com
Warner Bros. Executive Slams Joss Whedon’s ‘Justice League’ Cut: ‘Stupefying’ and ‘Piece of Sh*t’
The anonymous executive tells Vanity Fair that nobody at Warner Bros. wanted to admit how horrible Whedon's "Justice League" came out.
Zack Sharf
Feb 22, 2021 9:45 am
Clay Enos/©Warner Bros. Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
With the release of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” now under one month away from streaming on HBO Max, one Warner Bros. executive is holding nothing back about his thoughts on the theatrical release of the film that bombed with critics in November 2017. Snyder left “Justice League” in post-production due to a family tragedy, and Warner Bros. brought in Joss Whedon to oversee the film’s completion and to direct reshoots that lightened up Snyder’s bleak tone. The resulting “Justice League” theatrical cut was a critical and commercial failure for Warner Bros. Speaking anonymously to Vanity Fair, one studio executive said everyone at Warner Bros. knew Whedon’s “Justice League” was a bomb.
“When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” the Warner Bros. executive said. “Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.”
Even before Snyder walked away from “Justice League,” the director was forced to battle Warner Bros. for creative control of the project. The studio dispatched DC Entertainment creative chief Geoff Johns and Warner Bros. co-production head Jon Berg to the production, where one of them would need to be on set every day monitoring Snyder and making sure the film wasn’t becoming too dark for Warner Bros.’ liking.
“You could say babysit,” Snyder said to Vanity Fair about Johns and Berg’s role on the film. “It didn’t bother me too much because they weren’t that threatening. I just felt the ideas they did have, where they were trying to inject humor and stuff like that, it wasn’t anything that was too outrageous.”
The studio also forced Snyder to cut out certain plot threads, including a proposed romance between Ben Affleck’s Batman and Amy Adams’ Lois Lane, and forbid him to make a version of the movie longer than two hours.
“How am I supposed to introduce six characters and an alien with potential for world domination in two hours?” Snyder said. “I mean, I can do it, it can be done. Clearly it was done. But I didn’t see it.”
To this day, Snyder has never seen Whedon’s “Justice League cut. Deborah Snyder, Snyder’s producing partner and wife, saw a private screening of Whedon’s cut before the film’s release and advised Zack to stay away from Whedon’s version. Deborah told Vanity Fair, ““It was just…it’s a weird experience. I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”
Deborah Snyder watched Whedon’s “Justice League” cut with Christopher Nolan, Warner Bros.’ “Dark Knight” trilogy director and one of the executive producers of Snyder’s DC films. After the screening, Nolan and Deborah went to Zack with a clear message.
“They came and they just said, ‘You can never see that movie,’” Zack Snyder said.
Warner Bros. is set to stream Snyder’s four-hour “Justice League” on HBO Max starting on March 18. Head over to Vanity Fair’s website to read Snyder’s interview in its entirety.
@darth frosty @ViCiouS @ansatsusha_gouki
www.vanityfair.com
Justice League: The Shocking, Exhilarating, Heartbreaking True Story of #TheSnyderCut
A demoralizing battle with Warner Bros. A devastating personal tragedy. A fan base he couldn’t control. Zack Snyder tells V.F. why he quit Justice League, and why he’s returned to complete a cut that’s reached near-mythical status.
BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
FEBRUARY 22, 2021
ACTION HERO Zack Snyder shoots a scene with Jason Momoa on the set of Justice League.BY CLAY ENOS.
Zack Snyder, the director of Justice League, has never seen Justice League. His name is in the credits as the filmmaker, but he’s never sat through the version released to the world three years ago. His wife, Deborah, who produced the movie, advised him not to.
In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just…it’s a weird experience,” she says now. “I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”
What happened to Justice League was a crisis of infinite doubt: a team of executives who lost faith in the architect of their faltering comic book movie empire, and a director in the midst of a family tragedy that sapped him of the will to fight. Joss Whedon, a director from another universe, the Marvel Cinematic one, left the Avengers after two movies and crossed over to comics rival DC, picking up Justice League not where Snyder left off, but remaking it significantly with extensive rewrites and hurried reshoots, just as the studio demanded.
On November 17, 2017, the team-up between Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Aquaman, and The Flash didn’t so much debut in theaters as crash into them. It was sneered at by critics, shrugged at by baffled moviegoers, and all but disowned by those who created it. Whedon has since been accused of unprofessional and abusive behavior on set. (The director declined repeated requests for a comment.) He left his name off the movie except to claim a shared writing credit with Chris Terrio, who had written Snyder’s previous installment, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
With Gal Gadot, whom he gave a career-making role as Wonder Woman.BY CLAY ENOS. Gadot in Batman v Superman.BY ZACK SNYDER.
Publicly, everyone close to the movie practiced their smiles and rehearsed their talking points in the hopes of doing no further damage to the project, not that it helped much. The movie earned $657 million globally, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider the nearly $300 million budget, including the reported $25 million for Whedon’s reworking, plus a conservative estimate of $100 million to $150 million in marketing costs. Factor in the sizable cut theaters take from the box office, and a return of only $657 million is a clear money loser. Six months later, Justice League’s box office was dwarfed by Marvel’s own all-star showcase Avengers: Infinity War, which flexed its muscles at $2 billion.
After their private screening of the Whedon cut, Nolan and Deborah Snyder emerged into the light with a shared mission. “They came and they just said, ‘You can never see that movie,’” Zack Snyder says during lunch at his Pasadena office, a modernist series of cubes jutting from a hillside that overlooks the Rose Bowl.
“Because I knew it would break his heart,” his wife adds.
That might seem overly dramatic. It’s just show business, after all. But the Snyders’ hearts had already been through a lot. The battle over Justice League was agonizing, but it wasn’t the worst thing to happen to their family that year. Not even close.
Professionally at least, things have vastly improved. For years, DC fans and Snyder enthusiasts—who worshipped his high-octane brawn-fests like his Dawn of the Dead remake, his ancient Greek battle saga 300, and his twisted Watchmen adaptation—beat a drum on social media demanding, demanding, demanding that Warner Bros. return Justice League to its original filmmaker and allow him to share his version of the movie. They dubbed it the #SnyderCut. The fans could be clever, but many were horrifically toxic. All of them were relentless, and they grew more numerous over time. Last May, they finally got their wish when Warner saw the potential to leverage all the free publicity and do something unprecedented on its upstart streaming service, HBO Max.
It’s not uncommon for directors to lose creative control of big-budget studio spectacles, or for other filmmakers to step in. But it’s unheard of for a studio to return to an exiled filmmaker and offer back the power and creative freedom it has yanked away, especially when some of the most beloved and lucrative characters in pop culture history are involved. The #SnyderCut is coming on March 18.
The battle of Thermopylae in 300.BY ZACK SNYDER.Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach/Walter Kovacs in Watchmen, 2009.BY ZACK SNYDER.
For the director’s devotees, it’s a Hollywood ending for a Hollywood story, but for the truly devastating thing that happened to Zack Snyder and his loved ones in 2017, there can be no fix, no do-over. In the throes of the conflict with Warner Bros., the Snyders’ 20-year-old daughter, home from college and in the middle of a long struggle with depression, took her own life.
After two years spent largely focused on their other children and extended family, Zack and Deborah went back to work, a difficult but vital part of the healing process. When they spoke to Vanity Fair for this story, they were completing Army of the Dead—a zombie-filled heist extravaganza that will launch a new, multipronged franchise for Netflix—as well as restoring Zack’s original vision for Justice League. The latter will be a four-hour event for HBO Max that will raise money for suicide prevention programs that could help spare others the grief that shook his family.
“It’s such a lightning strike in the center of this whole saga,” Snyder says of his daughter Autumn’s death. “It has informed everything we’ve done since.”
Their daughter’s death was the reason the Snyders walked away from Justice League, realizing their fight and spirit was needed at home, with their other children, and with each other, rather than in a losing battle with a powerful studio. Now she is the main reason he decided to come back.
“At the end of the movie, it says ‘For Autumn,’” Snyder says, sitting in the shadows of a darkened editing suite, frames from the movie frozen on the screens around him. When he talks about his daughter, the otherwise scrappy, ebullient 54-year-old filmmaker always looks away. “Without her, this absolutely would not have happened.”
Jared Leto as the Joker in Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.Jared Leto as the Joker in Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.
Zack and his then-wife Denise Weber adopted Autumn when she was one. “A little over one,” he says, smiling at the memory of her wild energy. “Still an infant, but crazy.” Autumn was slightly older than the couple’s son, Eli. They had two more children before they divorced. Snyder had two sons with line producer Kirsten Elin before marrying Deborah, his longtime producing partner, in 2004, with whom he adopted two more children. The filmmaker has often said being an adoptive father is one of the reasons he was so invested in the story of Kal-El, a powerful being who became Superman thanks to the love and care of Jonathan and Martha Kent.
More than three years after Autumn’s death, Snyder still slips between the past and present tense when talking about her. “She’s the only dork,” he says of his family. “She was the only fan. The rest of them…” He shrugs. Today, Eli is interested in filmmaking, but Autumn was the only one of his children who matched her dad’s kidlike enthusiasm for gods, monsters, aliens, and superheroes. “She’s super creative,” he says. “She was a writer. She was at Sarah Lawrence to be a writer.”
Snyder swipes through his phone to show a selfie Autumn took in the letterman jacket worn by Ray Fisher’s character in Justice League, a football star horrendously wounded in a car accident and rebuilt by his scientist father into the half robot warrior Cyborg.
Autumn had been in therapy and on medications, but the depression remained brutal. “She was always wondering about her worth. ‘What is my worth? What am I supposed to do? What am I about?’” Snyder stumbles on his words, his eyes glassy. “The conversation was like, ‘Of course you’re amazing! What do you mean your worth? You’re worth more than anything in the world!’ And she would just be like, ‘…yeah.’”
Snyder says Autumn used writing to vent her pain, to channel it into words that might contain it, or explain it. She adored sci-fi. “Her main characters are always in this battle with things from another dimension that no one can see,” says Snyder. “But it’s a serious war. And that war was happening to her every day. I think so many people are in that battle, and they smile and nod at you.”
The fact that a studio had lost faith in Snyder’s ability to make Justice League seemed mundane and pointless after Autumn’s death. “It’s such a lightning strike in the center of this whole saga,” says Snyder. “And in a lot of ways it has informed everything we’ve done since.”
The Snyders tried to keep going for two months after Autumn’s death, finding solace in finishing Justice League. But by then the situation with Warner Bros. had imploded. The official story was that the Snyders were voluntarily leaving the movie due to their family tragedy, and that Zack had handpicked Whedon to complete the movie he had planned. Only half of that was true.
In 2010, when he first began working on DC movies for Warner Bros., Snyder was promoted as a visionary director, though critics sometimes differed. Even his hits could be divisive. He’d emerged from music videos and commercials with the breakout remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004 and followed it up with the otherworldly, visually audacious tale of resistance 300, which became a box office behemoth in 2007. Given his choice of projects, Snyder picked Watchmen, the iconic graphic novel that scorned the classic tropes of superhero storytelling and explored the corrupting nature of power. His 2009 adaptation upended comic book expectations just as Hollywood was building epic new franchises. Snyder then made a pair of box office disappointments—a digitally animated adventure about warring owls called Legend of the Guardians and the surreal, and some would say sexist, action movie Sucker Punch—before being called to take on a legend among legends: Superman.
When it debuted in 2013, Man of Steel established Henry Cavill as an object of global thirst, just as 300 had done for Gerard Butler and his washboard abs. Snyder’s twist was to present a conflicted Clark Kent rather than the sunny alter ego played by Christopher Reeve. Snyder’s Superman was willing to kill for what he thought was right—which many longtime fans of the character found reprehensible—and, though he still saved the world, he never felt like he truly belonged in it. The studio had hoped for more than the $668 million it made at the box office. But Man of Steel fared well enough for Snyder to get another shot, this time bringing Ben Affleck into the universe as Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The subtitle was a giveaway. This would be a prologue to Justice League, a superhero crossover event that some moviegoers had been pining for forever.
Snyder wasn’t just making big-budget tentpoles. He’d become the architect of the entire DC cinematic universe—and his casting choices continue to resonate. He chose Gal Gadot to play Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman and produced Patty Jenkins’s stand-alone movie about the Amazonian princess. “I remember Gal saying to me, ‘Zack, I was going to quit the business. I was getting ready to just move back to Tel Aviv and just have a life there. I was done with Hollywood. I was going to do this one more audition.’ Then she came in, and I was like, ‘That’s my Wonder Woman.’” Now she’s the whole world’s.
As with Man of Steel, Snyder continued to challenge expectations and norms, which sometimes led to pushback from the studio and originalist fans. Aquaman, for instance, has always looked WASPy in the comics. In casting the role for Batman v Superman, Snyder decided to forgo the blond hair and blue eyes of the comic book hero in favor of the long, dark locks and smoky gaze of Jason Momoa, who had come in to audition for Bruce Wayne. “He’s a Pacific Islander, there’s a connection to the sea—what if he’s Aquaman?” he remembers thinking. “Everyone was like, ‘You’re insane. That is not a thing.’”
Ray Fisher in his motion capture suit for Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.
It became part of a pattern. The studio gave Snyder the power to go anywhere he chose with its most valuable characters, and he always went somewhere other than… “than what they wanted,” the director says. Still, to his credit, all the recent DC films have used Snyder’s universe as a foundation, even Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey, which take place in his version of Gotham City. The upcoming Flash film will connect all the disparate DC films by ricocheting through multiple universes, with Michael Keaton’s Batman appearing along with Affleck’s.
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But harsh reviews for Batman v Superman demolished Warner Bros.’ confidence in Snyder. Even the director’s champions, like production head Greg Silverman, were worried. “When Batman v Superman came out and we did get a negative reaction from the fans, it was disheartening for all of us,” says Silverman, now the founder and head of independent content company Stampede Ventures. “Zack had made these movies, like 300, that were such crowd-pleasers. And that was our job—to make crowd-pleasers. And here, we have made a movie together, and it didn’t really please the audience.”
When Snyder quit, he took his unfinished Justice League on a laptop as a memento. He figured he’d show it to friends.
Marvel Studios movies, whose success exerted so much pressure on the DC team, hit on a formula that mirrored their comic book roots—telling stories about relatable, everyday people grappling with sudden phenomenal powers. Snyder’s DC universe approached its superheroes from the opposite direction, depicting gods and immortals who are at ease wielding cosmic strengths but strain to be human and connect to the ordinary world. The director envisioned this as operatic, tragic, and perhaps a more challenging type of comic book storytelling, but Warner Bros. feared it made his heroes gloomy, their abilities a curse.
Diane Nelson, who was president of DC Entertainment at the time, says she appreciated that Snyder was more into deconstructing the familiar than just recapitulating it. “Zack is a masterful visual storyteller who goes deep on individual characters,” she says. “For some people, that is amazing, and for other people that becomes the problem because they have fixed opinions about who these DC characters are and are not.”
In 2016, as principal photography got under way on Justice League in the United Kingdom, rumors percolated that Snyder had been fired from the film. That didn’t happen, but Warner Bros.’ then chairman and CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, did assign watchdogs in the form of DC Entertainment creative chief Geoff Johns and Warner Bros. co-production head Jon Berg. The edict was clear: At least one of them had to be on the set every day.
Berg, who’s now production president at Stampede, recalls that duty as a low point. “It was really tricky and not a position that I loved, to be honest,” he says. “I tried to be forthright about what I thought creatively. My job was to try to mediate between a creator whose vision is instinctually dark and a studio that perceived, rightly or wrong, that the fans wanted something lighter. I was respectful of the director and didn’t pursue things that were coming at me from the corporate side that I thought weren’t in line with what would make the best movie.”
Snyder knew why Johns and Berg were on the set. “You could say babysit,” he says. Many filmmakers would have bristled at the intrusion, but he was gracious. “It didn’t bother me too much because they weren’t that threatening. I just felt the ideas they did have, where they were trying to inject humor and stuff like that, it wasn’t anything that was too outrageous.”
Ben Affleck as Batman in Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.Amber Heard as Mera.BY ZACK SNYDER.
But Warner Bros. did nix some of his more sweeping notions for Justice League, like adding a romance between Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Amy Adams’s Lois Lane, who was mourning Superman’s death in the previous film. “The intention was that Bruce fell in love with Lois and then realized that the only way to save the world was to bring Superman back to life,” says Snyder. “So he had this insane conflict, because Lois, of course, was still in love with Superman. We had this beautiful speech where [Bruce] said to Alfred: ‘I never had a life outside the cave. I never imagined a world for me beyond this. But this woman makes me think that if I can get this group of gods together, then my job is done. I can quit. I can stop.’ And of course that doesn’t work out for him.”
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It didn’t work out for Snyder either. The studio said no.
The downside of making epics is the studios’ financial expectations. For Justice League, Warner Bros. wanted a big, round billion dollars in global box office, which Snyder’s movies had never reached. In January 2017, the director showed his first cut to Tsujihara. It did not go well, according to Snyder and others. (Tsujihara, who resigned from Warner Bros. in 2019 amid a sexual misconduct scandal involving the aspiring actress Charlotte Kirk, declined an interview request.)
Among the issues was the length of the film. “There was a mandate from Tsujihara that the movie be two hours long,” says Snyder. That order had a paradoxical impact, because it meant eliminating much of the heart and humor the studio also wanted, like a comical romantic subplot between Ezra Miller’s Flash and Kiersey Clemons’s Iris, the latter of whom was absent entirely from the Whedon film. (On the day Vanity Fair visited his office, Snyder was working on finalizing the music for the restored scene in which The Flash rescues her from a car crash.)
Snyder also saw a bigger structural problem with the “make it shorter” order: “How am I supposed to introduce six characters and an alien with potential for world domination in two hours? I mean, I can do it, it can be done. Clearly it was done,” he says, referring to Whedon’s version. “But I didn’t see it.”
Reports that Snyder himself asked Whedon for help were false. Johns, one of the studio-appointed babysitters, had been planning a Batgirl movie with Whedon, and Snyder and others say Johns recruited him to do rewrites for Justice League. (Johns’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Once again, Snyder was gracious and even hopeful: “I thought maybe he could write some cool scenes. I thought that would be fun.”
Soon, it became clear that Warner Bros. was giving Whedon more and more power. He would not just advise during reshoots, but also do some directing himself. Snyder says he only had one conversation with Whedon, about the studio’s notes. Reeling from Autumn’s death—and finding anguish in their work rather than relief—Zack and Deborah quit. “We just lost the will to fight that fight in a lot of ways,” says Zack. “All of us, the whole family, we’re just so broken by [losing Autumn] that having those conversations in the middle of it really became…I was like, ‘Really?’ Frankly I think we did the right thing because I think it would’ve been either incredibly belligerent or we just rolled over.”
One by one, he called members of his cast and crew. “I remember I was in a movie theater, coincidentally enough,” Ray Fisher said on the set of Snyder’s reshoots last fall. “I was walking into the AMC right in Times Square. And I got the call from Zack and he was saying that he had to deal with stuff with the fam and he was having to step away. I had a trillion questions. My heart sank.”
Whedon rewrote and reshot about three quarters of Justice League, from what Snyder can gather. When fans ask him about details of the movie that bears his name, he usually has no idea what they are talking about. Worst of all, for Warner Bros., Whedon didn’t exactly save the movie. “When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” says a studio executive, who requested anonymity. “The robber on the rooftop—so goofy and awful. The Russian family—so useless and pointless. Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.”
Justice League opened on November 17, 2017, and cratered. Because Cavill had been making Mission: Impossible Fallout during the reshoots, Whedon’s team had to digitally erase his mustache in Justice League, which led to a bizarre warping of his face. The jokes fell flat. And behind the scenes, some of the cast had revolted.
Fisher has publicly claimed Whedon was abusive on set, and that Warner Bros. executives “enabled” his actions. Gadot told the Los Angeles Times that she also had a negative experience with Whedon, which she reported to higher-ups. After concluding its investigation, Warner Bros. announced that “remedial action” had been taken, though the studio didn’t offer specifics. Days before that announcement, HBO, a division of WarnerMedia, parted ways with Whedon on the sci-fi series The Nevers. Fisher continues to clash with the studio and has expressed dismay at the outcome of its investigation.
“[The cast] were very loyal to Zack, and they were hurting for him,” says Nelson, the former DC president. “It would have been a difficult environment for any new director to walk into—I have no doubt about that. But then how Joss chose to handle that is Joss’s to live with.”
In the aftermath of Whedon’s version, a new narrative arose on social media: #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. Snyder gradually began to encourage the movement, but it was hardly the first thing on his mind.
“From the time we left,” says Snyder, “it was not a great year, but we did a lot of stuff with family. It was really important. An important year.”
That year together became two. After grieving Autumn and starting to heal with his family, he began work on Army of the Dead, a visceral, funny, and exceedingly dark smash-and-grab story about an elite strike team that goes into a zombie-overrun Las Vegas to retrieve a hidden fortune before the hot zone is nuked. (The zombie virus emerges from Area 51, so aliens may be involved too.) During a day-long interview, Snyder giddily scans through concept art for an accompanying animated series, approving vehicles, otherworldly weapons, and supernatural beings. He makes suggestions for changes to his team of artists, all working remotely via Zoom. Behind him on the wall-length bookshelf, there is a frame with two photos: Autumn and Eli in their bathing suits as toddlers, beaming with the same smiles as their dad as he assesses his monsters.
The Army of the Dead movie is a lot to tackle, and the related prequel and animated series even more all-consuming. Scott Stuber, head of original films at Netflix, says it’s a chance to build a world with a filmmaker who’s hungry to return: “Zack went through something very difficult, and I think he probably realized, like we all do, it’s okay to be vulnerable. For those of us lucky enough to know him and Deborah, he’s a very soulful, kind, thoughtful human being. He’s got this façade of big action movies and all these bravado things, but there’s a sweet kindness to him.”
Snyder’s new Netflix franchise, Army of the Dead.CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX © 2021. Tig Notaro as Marianne Peters in Army of the Dead.BY ZACK SNYDER.
At a time of stories of abusive creators, Snyder is an anomaly. Even executives who were sometimes at odds with him agree that he’s genuinely nice. “I’d be stronger than that,” says Silverman. “He’s a wonderful guy and fostered a wonderful working environment on his sets. He really valued the crew. He valued his cast.”
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Snyder’s movies tend to be about strength and what it means to wield it. Maybe it was inevitable that he’d eventually not only join the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut bandwagon, but begin driving it.
When Snyder left Warner Bros., he took his laptop, which was emblazoned with a Justice League sticker. On the hard drive was his original, nearly four-hour version. It was devoid of visual effects, music, and all the fine-tuning that make a movie a movie. It was also in black and white. To him, it was a memento. He thought, “We would just show it to random people who stopped by, like our friends or whatever.”
Rather than fade away, the demand for the Snyder cut gained momentum over the years. Groups paid to have single-engine airplanes fly a “Release the Snyder Cut” banner around both the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank and the annual Comic-Con gathering in San Diego. Last year, fans pooled resources to buy a Times Square billboard.
A noxious contingent of followers, though, didn’t just advocate for the movie, but also used social media to attack people who were critical of Snyder or their cause. Maybe they hoped to silence dissenters, or maybe they were just trolls being trolls. In any case, film journalists with negative takes reported getting swarmed with insults and even threats. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of online fandom and fandom culture is headed in this very toxic direction,” says Kayleigh Donaldson, who writes for Pajiba.com. It is especially strong from Snyder cut acolytes, she adds, perhaps because they respond misguidedly to the director’s tales of loner heroes in a hostile world. “I don’t get this from the Birds of Prey fans or the Shazam fans,” says Donaldson. “I got a little bit from Joker fans but nowhere near the same level.” Nonetheless, she’s looking forward to Snyder’s movie: “I think 300 is great fun. I think the first 10 minutes of Watchmen are some of the best things any superhero movie has ever done.” Even if she doesn’t end up liking the Snyder cut, she says, “I would rather watch one person’s chaos than a committee’s snooze-fest.”
Drea Letamendi, a clinical psychologist who explores superhero archetypes on the Arkham Sessions podcast, notes that fans get especially aggressive on social media when they feel they’ve been denied something. “What I have observed is an enduring false sense of ownership, which can manifest as abuse, threats, and strong, intense reactions when a story doesn’t go their way,” she says. Fighting for the unseen cut of the film became a cause. In some quarters, the worst behavior metastasized. “They’re shouting, and people are listening to them. Even if it’s negative comments, they’re getting positive reinforcement to continue down that path.”
The trolls may have actually held back the movement, like looters at an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Snyder cringes at descriptions of the abusive tactics. “I 100 percent think it’s wrong,” he says. “I don’t think that anyone should be calling anyone anything. I’ve always tried to give people in the fandom attention who do good things.”
November 2019 brought a sustained hashtag push on Twitter, which Snyder promoted. Gadot and Affleck were now calling for his cut to be released, too. A few days later, Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros. Picture Group, called Snyder with an offer: Let’s try again. “A lot of the people at the company, myself included, always felt badly that Zack didn’t get to finish his vision of this film because of the circumstances,” says Emmerich. “And so if there was a way to make it logistically and financially possible, which HBO Max did, and Zack had a willingness to do it, it seemed like a win for everybody.”
Snyder shooting the cast of Justice League.BY CLAY ENOS.
Initially, says Snyder, Warner Bros. just wanted to release the raw footage on his laptop. “I was like, ‘That’s a no, that’s a hard no,’” he says. “And they’re like, ‘But why? You can just put up the rough cut.’” Snyder didn’t trust their motivations. “I go, ‘Here’s why. Three reasons: One, you get the internet off your back, which is probably your main reason for wanting to do this. Two, you get to feel vindicated for making things right, I guess, on some level. And then three, you get a shitty version of the movie that you can point at and go, ‘See? It’s not that good anyway. So maybe I was right.’ I was like, No chance. I would rather just have the Snyder cut be a mythical unicorn for all time.”
Snyder estimates that it cost around $70 million to undo Whedon’s redo. For that, HBO Max gets four hours of hotly anticipated programming—and the Hollywood comeback story of a lifetime. Snyder himself gets nothing. “I’m not getting paid,” he says. He was paid the first time, of course. This time, he wants creative control, and forgoing a fee helped. “I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, and it allowed me to keep my negotiating powers with these people pretty strong.”
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Fisher, for one, was eager to return. “There’s not a day that’s gone by over the last three years, I haven’t thought about this movie, that I have not sat up at night thinking, What if there was a world wherein this thing actually does get released?” says the actor, sitting on set in his gray scale motion capture suit. “I probably should have let it go. But there was so much that we left behind in this version of the film. It’s a completely different movie.”
As for the fan base, the Snyder movement has contributed half a million dollars to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention through donations, sales of merchandise, and auctions of props. “People have been saying, ‘Oh, they attack people,’” says Deborah Snyder, her eyes tearing. “But this fan base has saved lives. As much as they wanted something for themselves, they’ve come together for this amazing cause. You feel so helpless trying to help someone, and you don’t know what to do. It’s literally life or death. And I felt like we didn’t really know where to turn.”
Rebuilding the story he had always envisioned is what invigorates Snyder most. He can go as deep and dark as he likes. He can say to hell with DC’s official time line for the characters and let this alt version of the Justice League story wind up wherever he pleases. He has put Superman in a sleek black suit instead of the iconic blue and red. He’s added the Joker (Jared Leto). He has reshot the ending with a hero cameo that will blow hard-core fans’ minds. In what may be a divisive move, he’s also presenting the movie in the boxy 4:3 format rather than wide-screen so that one day it can be watched on IMAX screens. Some may be irritated by seeing Justice League on HBO Max with black bars on either side. Snyder isn’t troubled by that.
The director is also layering in some deeply personal elements. The movie closes with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” performed by Allison Crowe, a friend who also sang it at Autumn’s funeral. It was Autumn’s favorite song. Now it’s an elegy to her. Justice League, however anyone else feels about it, is made of the things—and people—Snyder loves, too. “When you think about the catharsis of it, if I was a potter, I would’ve made some pottery to look for some way through this,” he says. “But I’m a filmmaker, so you get this giant movie.” He wants people to love it. If some don’t? He’s all right with that, with all of it. Whatever comes, he’s okay.
What is my worth? What am I supposed to do? What am I about?
Zack Snyder is answering Autumn’s questions for himself.
‘Justice League’: The Shocking, Exhilarating, Heartbreaking True Story of #TheSnyderCut
A demoralizing battle with Warner Bros. A devastating personal tragedy. A fan base he couldn’t control. Zack Snyder tells V.F. why he quit ‘Justice League,’ and why he’s returned to complete a cut that’s reached near-mythical status.
Justice League: The Shocking, Exhilarating, Heartbreaking True Story of #TheSnyderCut
A demoralizing battle with Warner Bros. A devastating personal tragedy. A fan base he couldn’t control. Zack Snyder tells V.F. why he quit Justice League, and why he’s returned to complete a cut that’s reached near-mythical status.
BY ANTHONY BREZNICAN
FEBRUARY 22, 2021
ACTION HERO Zack Snyder shoots a scene with Jason Momoa on the set of Justice League.BY CLAY ENOS.
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Zack Snyder, the director of Justice League, has never seen Justice League. His name is in the credits as the filmmaker, but he’s never sat through the version released to the world three years ago. His wife, Deborah, who produced the movie, advised him not to.
In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just…it’s a weird experience,” she says now. “I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”
What happened to Justice League was a crisis of infinite doubt: a team of executives who lost faith in the architect of their faltering comic book movie empire, and a director in the midst of a family tragedy that sapped him of the will to fight. Joss Whedon, a director from another universe, the Marvel Cinematic one, left the Avengers after two movies and crossed over to comics rival DC, picking up Justice League not where Snyder left off, but remaking it significantly with extensive rewrites and hurried reshoots, just as the studio demanded.
On November 17, 2017, the team-up between Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Aquaman, and The Flash didn’t so much debut in theaters as crash into them. It was sneered at by critics, shrugged at by baffled moviegoers, and all but disowned by those who created it. Whedon has since been accused of unprofessional and abusive behavior on set. (The director declined repeated requests for a comment.) He left his name off the movie except to claim a shared writing credit with Chris Terrio, who had written Snyder’s previous installment, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
With Gal Gadot, whom he gave a career-making role as Wonder Woman.BY CLAY ENOS. Gadot in Batman v Superman.BY ZACK SNYDER.
Publicly, everyone close to the movie practiced their smiles and rehearsed their talking points in the hopes of doing no further damage to the project, not that it helped much. The movie earned $657 million globally, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider the nearly $300 million budget, including the reported $25 million for Whedon’s reworking, plus a conservative estimate of $100 million to $150 million in marketing costs. Factor in the sizable cut theaters take from the box office, and a return of only $657 million is a clear money loser. Six months later, Justice League’s box office was dwarfed by Marvel’s own all-star showcase Avengers: Infinity War, which flexed its muscles at $2 billion.
After their private screening of the Whedon cut, Nolan and Deborah Snyder emerged into the light with a shared mission. “They came and they just said, ‘You can never see that movie,’” Zack Snyder says during lunch at his Pasadena office, a modernist series of cubes jutting from a hillside that overlooks the Rose Bowl.
“Because I knew it would break his heart,” his wife adds.
That might seem overly dramatic. It’s just show business, after all. But the Snyders’ hearts had already been through a lot. The battle over Justice League was agonizing, but it wasn’t the worst thing to happen to their family that year. Not even close.
Professionally at least, things have vastly improved. For years, DC fans and Snyder enthusiasts—who worshipped his high-octane brawn-fests like his Dawn of the Dead remake, his ancient Greek battle saga 300, and his twisted Watchmen adaptation—beat a drum on social media demanding, demanding, demanding that Warner Bros. return Justice League to its original filmmaker and allow him to share his version of the movie. They dubbed it the #SnyderCut. The fans could be clever, but many were horrifically toxic. All of them were relentless, and they grew more numerous over time. Last May, they finally got their wish when Warner saw the potential to leverage all the free publicity and do something unprecedented on its upstart streaming service, HBO Max.
It’s not uncommon for directors to lose creative control of big-budget studio spectacles, or for other filmmakers to step in. But it’s unheard of for a studio to return to an exiled filmmaker and offer back the power and creative freedom it has yanked away, especially when some of the most beloved and lucrative characters in pop culture history are involved. The #SnyderCut is coming on March 18.
The battle of Thermopylae in 300.BY ZACK SNYDER.Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach/Walter Kovacs in Watchmen, 2009.BY ZACK SNYDER.
For the director’s devotees, it’s a Hollywood ending for a Hollywood story, but for the truly devastating thing that happened to Zack Snyder and his loved ones in 2017, there can be no fix, no do-over. In the throes of the conflict with Warner Bros., the Snyders’ 20-year-old daughter, home from college and in the middle of a long struggle with depression, took her own life.
After two years spent largely focused on their other children and extended family, Zack and Deborah went back to work, a difficult but vital part of the healing process. When they spoke to Vanity Fair for this story, they were completing Army of the Dead—a zombie-filled heist extravaganza that will launch a new, multipronged franchise for Netflix—as well as restoring Zack’s original vision for Justice League. The latter will be a four-hour event for HBO Max that will raise money for suicide prevention programs that could help spare others the grief that shook his family.
“It’s such a lightning strike in the center of this whole saga,” Snyder says of his daughter Autumn’s death. “It has informed everything we’ve done since.”
Their daughter’s death was the reason the Snyders walked away from Justice League, realizing their fight and spirit was needed at home, with their other children, and with each other, rather than in a losing battle with a powerful studio. Now she is the main reason he decided to come back.
“At the end of the movie, it says ‘For Autumn,’” Snyder says, sitting in the shadows of a darkened editing suite, frames from the movie frozen on the screens around him. When he talks about his daughter, the otherwise scrappy, ebullient 54-year-old filmmaker always looks away. “Without her, this absolutely would not have happened.”
Jared Leto as the Joker in Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.Jared Leto as the Joker in Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.
Zack and his then-wife Denise Weber adopted Autumn when she was one. “A little over one,” he says, smiling at the memory of her wild energy. “Still an infant, but crazy.” Autumn was slightly older than the couple’s son, Eli. They had two more children before they divorced. Snyder had two sons with line producer Kirsten Elin before marrying Deborah, his longtime producing partner, in 2004, with whom he adopted two more children. The filmmaker has often said being an adoptive father is one of the reasons he was so invested in the story of Kal-El, a powerful being who became Superman thanks to the love and care of Jonathan and Martha Kent.
More than three years after Autumn’s death, Snyder still slips between the past and present tense when talking about her. “She’s the only dork,” he says of his family. “She was the only fan. The rest of them…” He shrugs. Today, Eli is interested in filmmaking, but Autumn was the only one of his children who matched her dad’s kidlike enthusiasm for gods, monsters, aliens, and superheroes. “She’s super creative,” he says. “She was a writer. She was at Sarah Lawrence to be a writer.”
Snyder swipes through his phone to show a selfie Autumn took in the letterman jacket worn by Ray Fisher’s character in Justice League, a football star horrendously wounded in a car accident and rebuilt by his scientist father into the half robot warrior Cyborg.
Autumn had been in therapy and on medications, but the depression remained brutal. “She was always wondering about her worth. ‘What is my worth? What am I supposed to do? What am I about?’” Snyder stumbles on his words, his eyes glassy. “The conversation was like, ‘Of course you’re amazing! What do you mean your worth? You’re worth more than anything in the world!’ And she would just be like, ‘…yeah.’”
Snyder says Autumn used writing to vent her pain, to channel it into words that might contain it, or explain it. She adored sci-fi. “Her main characters are always in this battle with things from another dimension that no one can see,” says Snyder. “But it’s a serious war. And that war was happening to her every day. I think so many people are in that battle, and they smile and nod at you.”
The fact that a studio had lost faith in Snyder’s ability to make Justice League seemed mundane and pointless after Autumn’s death. “It’s such a lightning strike in the center of this whole saga,” says Snyder. “And in a lot of ways it has informed everything we’ve done since.”
The Snyders tried to keep going for two months after Autumn’s death, finding solace in finishing Justice League. But by then the situation with Warner Bros. had imploded. The official story was that the Snyders were voluntarily leaving the movie due to their family tragedy, and that Zack had handpicked Whedon to complete the movie he had planned. Only half of that was true.
In 2010, when he first began working on DC movies for Warner Bros., Snyder was promoted as a visionary director, though critics sometimes differed. Even his hits could be divisive. He’d emerged from music videos and commercials with the breakout remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004 and followed it up with the otherworldly, visually audacious tale of resistance 300, which became a box office behemoth in 2007. Given his choice of projects, Snyder picked Watchmen, the iconic graphic novel that scorned the classic tropes of superhero storytelling and explored the corrupting nature of power. His 2009 adaptation upended comic book expectations just as Hollywood was building epic new franchises. Snyder then made a pair of box office disappointments—a digitally animated adventure about warring owls called Legend of the Guardians and the surreal, and some would say sexist, action movie Sucker Punch—before being called to take on a legend among legends: Superman.
When it debuted in 2013, Man of Steel established Henry Cavill as an object of global thirst, just as 300 had done for Gerard Butler and his washboard abs. Snyder’s twist was to present a conflicted Clark Kent rather than the sunny alter ego played by Christopher Reeve. Snyder’s Superman was willing to kill for what he thought was right—which many longtime fans of the character found reprehensible—and, though he still saved the world, he never felt like he truly belonged in it. The studio had hoped for more than the $668 million it made at the box office. But Man of Steel fared well enough for Snyder to get another shot, this time bringing Ben Affleck into the universe as Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The subtitle was a giveaway. This would be a prologue to Justice League, a superhero crossover event that some moviegoers had been pining for forever.
Snyder wasn’t just making big-budget tentpoles. He’d become the architect of the entire DC cinematic universe—and his casting choices continue to resonate. He chose Gal Gadot to play Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman and produced Patty Jenkins’s stand-alone movie about the Amazonian princess. “I remember Gal saying to me, ‘Zack, I was going to quit the business. I was getting ready to just move back to Tel Aviv and just have a life there. I was done with Hollywood. I was going to do this one more audition.’ Then she came in, and I was like, ‘That’s my Wonder Woman.’” Now she’s the whole world’s.
As with Man of Steel, Snyder continued to challenge expectations and norms, which sometimes led to pushback from the studio and originalist fans. Aquaman, for instance, has always looked WASPy in the comics. In casting the role for Batman v Superman, Snyder decided to forgo the blond hair and blue eyes of the comic book hero in favor of the long, dark locks and smoky gaze of Jason Momoa, who had come in to audition for Bruce Wayne. “He’s a Pacific Islander, there’s a connection to the sea—what if he’s Aquaman?” he remembers thinking. “Everyone was like, ‘You’re insane. That is not a thing.’”
Ray Fisher in his motion capture suit for Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.
It became part of a pattern. The studio gave Snyder the power to go anywhere he chose with its most valuable characters, and he always went somewhere other than… “than what they wanted,” the director says. Still, to his credit, all the recent DC films have used Snyder’s universe as a foundation, even Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey, which take place in his version of Gotham City. The upcoming Flash film will connect all the disparate DC films by ricocheting through multiple universes, with Michael Keaton’s Batman appearing along with Affleck’s.
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But harsh reviews for Batman v Superman demolished Warner Bros.’ confidence in Snyder. Even the director’s champions, like production head Greg Silverman, were worried. “When Batman v Superman came out and we did get a negative reaction from the fans, it was disheartening for all of us,” says Silverman, now the founder and head of independent content company Stampede Ventures. “Zack had made these movies, like 300, that were such crowd-pleasers. And that was our job—to make crowd-pleasers. And here, we have made a movie together, and it didn’t really please the audience.”
When Snyder quit, he took his unfinished Justice League on a laptop as a memento. He figured he’d show it to friends.
Marvel Studios movies, whose success exerted so much pressure on the DC team, hit on a formula that mirrored their comic book roots—telling stories about relatable, everyday people grappling with sudden phenomenal powers. Snyder’s DC universe approached its superheroes from the opposite direction, depicting gods and immortals who are at ease wielding cosmic strengths but strain to be human and connect to the ordinary world. The director envisioned this as operatic, tragic, and perhaps a more challenging type of comic book storytelling, but Warner Bros. feared it made his heroes gloomy, their abilities a curse.
Diane Nelson, who was president of DC Entertainment at the time, says she appreciated that Snyder was more into deconstructing the familiar than just recapitulating it. “Zack is a masterful visual storyteller who goes deep on individual characters,” she says. “For some people, that is amazing, and for other people that becomes the problem because they have fixed opinions about who these DC characters are and are not.”
In 2016, as principal photography got under way on Justice League in the United Kingdom, rumors percolated that Snyder had been fired from the film. That didn’t happen, but Warner Bros.’ then chairman and CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, did assign watchdogs in the form of DC Entertainment creative chief Geoff Johns and Warner Bros. co-production head Jon Berg. The edict was clear: At least one of them had to be on the set every day.
Berg, who’s now production president at Stampede, recalls that duty as a low point. “It was really tricky and not a position that I loved, to be honest,” he says. “I tried to be forthright about what I thought creatively. My job was to try to mediate between a creator whose vision is instinctually dark and a studio that perceived, rightly or wrong, that the fans wanted something lighter. I was respectful of the director and didn’t pursue things that were coming at me from the corporate side that I thought weren’t in line with what would make the best movie.”
Snyder knew why Johns and Berg were on the set. “You could say babysit,” he says. Many filmmakers would have bristled at the intrusion, but he was gracious. “It didn’t bother me too much because they weren’t that threatening. I just felt the ideas they did have, where they were trying to inject humor and stuff like that, it wasn’t anything that was too outrageous.”
Ben Affleck as Batman in Justice League.BY ZACK SNYDER.Amber Heard as Mera.BY ZACK SNYDER.
But Warner Bros. did nix some of his more sweeping notions for Justice League, like adding a romance between Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Amy Adams’s Lois Lane, who was mourning Superman’s death in the previous film. “The intention was that Bruce fell in love with Lois and then realized that the only way to save the world was to bring Superman back to life,” says Snyder. “So he had this insane conflict, because Lois, of course, was still in love with Superman. We had this beautiful speech where [Bruce] said to Alfred: ‘I never had a life outside the cave. I never imagined a world for me beyond this. But this woman makes me think that if I can get this group of gods together, then my job is done. I can quit. I can stop.’ And of course that doesn’t work out for him.”
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It didn’t work out for Snyder either. The studio said no.
The downside of making epics is the studios’ financial expectations. For Justice League, Warner Bros. wanted a big, round billion dollars in global box office, which Snyder’s movies had never reached. In January 2017, the director showed his first cut to Tsujihara. It did not go well, according to Snyder and others. (Tsujihara, who resigned from Warner Bros. in 2019 amid a sexual misconduct scandal involving the aspiring actress Charlotte Kirk, declined an interview request.)
Among the issues was the length of the film. “There was a mandate from Tsujihara that the movie be two hours long,” says Snyder. That order had a paradoxical impact, because it meant eliminating much of the heart and humor the studio also wanted, like a comical romantic subplot between Ezra Miller’s Flash and Kiersey Clemons’s Iris, the latter of whom was absent entirely from the Whedon film. (On the day Vanity Fair visited his office, Snyder was working on finalizing the music for the restored scene in which The Flash rescues her from a car crash.)
Snyder also saw a bigger structural problem with the “make it shorter” order: “How am I supposed to introduce six characters and an alien with potential for world domination in two hours? I mean, I can do it, it can be done. Clearly it was done,” he says, referring to Whedon’s version. “But I didn’t see it.”
Reports that Snyder himself asked Whedon for help were false. Johns, one of the studio-appointed babysitters, had been planning a Batgirl movie with Whedon, and Snyder and others say Johns recruited him to do rewrites for Justice League. (Johns’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Once again, Snyder was gracious and even hopeful: “I thought maybe he could write some cool scenes. I thought that would be fun.”
Soon, it became clear that Warner Bros. was giving Whedon more and more power. He would not just advise during reshoots, but also do some directing himself. Snyder says he only had one conversation with Whedon, about the studio’s notes. Reeling from Autumn’s death—and finding anguish in their work rather than relief—Zack and Deborah quit. “We just lost the will to fight that fight in a lot of ways,” says Zack. “All of us, the whole family, we’re just so broken by [losing Autumn] that having those conversations in the middle of it really became…I was like, ‘Really?’ Frankly I think we did the right thing because I think it would’ve been either incredibly belligerent or we just rolled over.”
One by one, he called members of his cast and crew. “I remember I was in a movie theater, coincidentally enough,” Ray Fisher said on the set of Snyder’s reshoots last fall. “I was walking into the AMC right in Times Square. And I got the call from Zack and he was saying that he had to deal with stuff with the fam and he was having to step away. I had a trillion questions. My heart sank.”
Whedon rewrote and reshot about three quarters of Justice League, from what Snyder can gather. When fans ask him about details of the movie that bears his name, he usually has no idea what they are talking about. Worst of all, for Warner Bros., Whedon didn’t exactly save the movie. “When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” says a studio executive, who requested anonymity. “The robber on the rooftop—so goofy and awful. The Russian family—so useless and pointless. Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.”
Justice League opened on November 17, 2017, and cratered. Because Cavill had been making Mission: Impossible Fallout during the reshoots, Whedon’s team had to digitally erase his mustache in Justice League, which led to a bizarre warping of his face. The jokes fell flat. And behind the scenes, some of the cast had revolted.
Fisher has publicly claimed Whedon was abusive on set, and that Warner Bros. executives “enabled” his actions. Gadot told the Los Angeles Times that she also had a negative experience with Whedon, which she reported to higher-ups. After concluding its investigation, Warner Bros. announced that “remedial action” had been taken, though the studio didn’t offer specifics. Days before that announcement, HBO, a division of WarnerMedia, parted ways with Whedon on the sci-fi series The Nevers. Fisher continues to clash with the studio and has expressed dismay at the outcome of its investigation.
“[The cast] were very loyal to Zack, and they were hurting for him,” says Nelson, the former DC president. “It would have been a difficult environment for any new director to walk into—I have no doubt about that. But then how Joss chose to handle that is Joss’s to live with.”
In the aftermath of Whedon’s version, a new narrative arose on social media: #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. Snyder gradually began to encourage the movement, but it was hardly the first thing on his mind.
“From the time we left,” says Snyder, “it was not a great year, but we did a lot of stuff with family. It was really important. An important year.”
That year together became two. After grieving Autumn and starting to heal with his family, he began work on Army of the Dead, a visceral, funny, and exceedingly dark smash-and-grab story about an elite strike team that goes into a zombie-overrun Las Vegas to retrieve a hidden fortune before the hot zone is nuked. (The zombie virus emerges from Area 51, so aliens may be involved too.) During a day-long interview, Snyder giddily scans through concept art for an accompanying animated series, approving vehicles, otherworldly weapons, and supernatural beings. He makes suggestions for changes to his team of artists, all working remotely via Zoom. Behind him on the wall-length bookshelf, there is a frame with two photos: Autumn and Eli in their bathing suits as toddlers, beaming with the same smiles as their dad as he assesses his monsters.
The Army of the Dead movie is a lot to tackle, and the related prequel and animated series even more all-consuming. Scott Stuber, head of original films at Netflix, says it’s a chance to build a world with a filmmaker who’s hungry to return: “Zack went through something very difficult, and I think he probably realized, like we all do, it’s okay to be vulnerable. For those of us lucky enough to know him and Deborah, he’s a very soulful, kind, thoughtful human being. He’s got this façade of big action movies and all these bravado things, but there’s a sweet kindness to him.”
Snyder’s new Netflix franchise, Army of the Dead.CLAY ENOS/NETFLIX © 2021. Tig Notaro as Marianne Peters in Army of the Dead.BY ZACK SNYDER.
At a time of stories of abusive creators, Snyder is an anomaly. Even executives who were sometimes at odds with him agree that he’s genuinely nice. “I’d be stronger than that,” says Silverman. “He’s a wonderful guy and fostered a wonderful working environment on his sets. He really valued the crew. He valued his cast.”
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Snyder’s movies tend to be about strength and what it means to wield it. Maybe it was inevitable that he’d eventually not only join the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut bandwagon, but begin driving it.
When Snyder left Warner Bros., he took his laptop, which was emblazoned with a Justice League sticker. On the hard drive was his original, nearly four-hour version. It was devoid of visual effects, music, and all the fine-tuning that make a movie a movie. It was also in black and white. To him, it was a memento. He thought, “We would just show it to random people who stopped by, like our friends or whatever.”
Rather than fade away, the demand for the Snyder cut gained momentum over the years. Groups paid to have single-engine airplanes fly a “Release the Snyder Cut” banner around both the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank and the annual Comic-Con gathering in San Diego. Last year, fans pooled resources to buy a Times Square billboard.
A noxious contingent of followers, though, didn’t just advocate for the movie, but also used social media to attack people who were critical of Snyder or their cause. Maybe they hoped to silence dissenters, or maybe they were just trolls being trolls. In any case, film journalists with negative takes reported getting swarmed with insults and even threats. “Unfortunately, I think a lot of online fandom and fandom culture is headed in this very toxic direction,” says Kayleigh Donaldson, who writes for Pajiba.com. It is especially strong from Snyder cut acolytes, she adds, perhaps because they respond misguidedly to the director’s tales of loner heroes in a hostile world. “I don’t get this from the Birds of Prey fans or the Shazam fans,” says Donaldson. “I got a little bit from Joker fans but nowhere near the same level.” Nonetheless, she’s looking forward to Snyder’s movie: “I think 300 is great fun. I think the first 10 minutes of Watchmen are some of the best things any superhero movie has ever done.” Even if she doesn’t end up liking the Snyder cut, she says, “I would rather watch one person’s chaos than a committee’s snooze-fest.”
Drea Letamendi, a clinical psychologist who explores superhero archetypes on the Arkham Sessions podcast, notes that fans get especially aggressive on social media when they feel they’ve been denied something. “What I have observed is an enduring false sense of ownership, which can manifest as abuse, threats, and strong, intense reactions when a story doesn’t go their way,” she says. Fighting for the unseen cut of the film became a cause. In some quarters, the worst behavior metastasized. “They’re shouting, and people are listening to them. Even if it’s negative comments, they’re getting positive reinforcement to continue down that path.”
The trolls may have actually held back the movement, like looters at an otherwise peaceful demonstration. Snyder cringes at descriptions of the abusive tactics. “I 100 percent think it’s wrong,” he says. “I don’t think that anyone should be calling anyone anything. I’ve always tried to give people in the fandom attention who do good things.”
November 2019 brought a sustained hashtag push on Twitter, which Snyder promoted. Gadot and Affleck were now calling for his cut to be released, too. A few days later, Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros. Picture Group, called Snyder with an offer: Let’s try again. “A lot of the people at the company, myself included, always felt badly that Zack didn’t get to finish his vision of this film because of the circumstances,” says Emmerich. “And so if there was a way to make it logistically and financially possible, which HBO Max did, and Zack had a willingness to do it, it seemed like a win for everybody.”
Snyder shooting the cast of Justice League.BY CLAY ENOS.
Initially, says Snyder, Warner Bros. just wanted to release the raw footage on his laptop. “I was like, ‘That’s a no, that’s a hard no,’” he says. “And they’re like, ‘But why? You can just put up the rough cut.’” Snyder didn’t trust their motivations. “I go, ‘Here’s why. Three reasons: One, you get the internet off your back, which is probably your main reason for wanting to do this. Two, you get to feel vindicated for making things right, I guess, on some level. And then three, you get a shitty version of the movie that you can point at and go, ‘See? It’s not that good anyway. So maybe I was right.’ I was like, No chance. I would rather just have the Snyder cut be a mythical unicorn for all time.”
Snyder estimates that it cost around $70 million to undo Whedon’s redo. For that, HBO Max gets four hours of hotly anticipated programming—and the Hollywood comeback story of a lifetime. Snyder himself gets nothing. “I’m not getting paid,” he says. He was paid the first time, of course. This time, he wants creative control, and forgoing a fee helped. “I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, and it allowed me to keep my negotiating powers with these people pretty strong.”
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Fisher, for one, was eager to return. “There’s not a day that’s gone by over the last three years, I haven’t thought about this movie, that I have not sat up at night thinking, What if there was a world wherein this thing actually does get released?” says the actor, sitting on set in his gray scale motion capture suit. “I probably should have let it go. But there was so much that we left behind in this version of the film. It’s a completely different movie.”
As for the fan base, the Snyder movement has contributed half a million dollars to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention through donations, sales of merchandise, and auctions of props. “People have been saying, ‘Oh, they attack people,’” says Deborah Snyder, her eyes tearing. “But this fan base has saved lives. As much as they wanted something for themselves, they’ve come together for this amazing cause. You feel so helpless trying to help someone, and you don’t know what to do. It’s literally life or death. And I felt like we didn’t really know where to turn.”
Rebuilding the story he had always envisioned is what invigorates Snyder most. He can go as deep and dark as he likes. He can say to hell with DC’s official time line for the characters and let this alt version of the Justice League story wind up wherever he pleases. He has put Superman in a sleek black suit instead of the iconic blue and red. He’s added the Joker (Jared Leto). He has reshot the ending with a hero cameo that will blow hard-core fans’ minds. In what may be a divisive move, he’s also presenting the movie in the boxy 4:3 format rather than wide-screen so that one day it can be watched on IMAX screens. Some may be irritated by seeing Justice League on HBO Max with black bars on either side. Snyder isn’t troubled by that.
The director is also layering in some deeply personal elements. The movie closes with Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” performed by Allison Crowe, a friend who also sang it at Autumn’s funeral. It was Autumn’s favorite song. Now it’s an elegy to her. Justice League, however anyone else feels about it, is made of the things—and people—Snyder loves, too. “When you think about the catharsis of it, if I was a potter, I would’ve made some pottery to look for some way through this,” he says. “But I’m a filmmaker, so you get this giant movie.” He wants people to love it. If some don’t? He’s all right with that, with all of it. Whatever comes, he’s okay.
What is my worth? What am I supposed to do? What am I about?
Zack Snyder is answering Autumn’s questions for himself.
They are smart for having that extended cut. I'll actually purchase the Blu-ray based on that extended cut where, usually I'd skip. Anyway, funny how every screams how much DC movies suck but like I said "niggas going to go see it anyway".
[/QUOTE]
Lol!!
I can pull up threads and conversations on this board of people saying that same nonsense.
Man they couldve left rhis as a surprise. Imnsick of the internet spoiling shit all the time‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ Actor Harry Lennix on Playing Martian Manhunter and the Joss Whedon Scandal
By Adam B. Vary
‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ Actor Harry Lennix on Playing Martian Manhunter and the Joss Whedon Scandal
"Zack Snyder's Justice League" actor Harry Lennix talks Martian Manhunter and why he hopes "people can forgive" in the Joss Whedon scandal.
When Harry Lennix first signed up to appear in Zack Snyder’s 2013 Superman film “Man of Steel,” he thought he was playing General Swanwick, the U.S. military’s primary point of contact with Henry Cavill’s Kryptonian superhero. In Snyder’s follow-up, 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Lennix returned as Swanwick, who’d been promoted to Secretary of Defense.
It wasn’t until Oct. 2019, however, that Lennix learned Snyder’s real intention was to reveal in 2017’s “Justice League” that Swanwick was actually J’onn J’onzz, a.k.a. the fan-favorite DC superhero — and eventual Justice League member — known as the Martian Manhunter. In the comics, J’onn is the last surviving member of his species; his abilities to change his appearance (normally, he’s green, bald, and has red eyes) have allowed him to live as a human on Earth.
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In a series of social media posts, Snyder revealed storyboards for a scene between Martha Kent (Diane Lane) and Lois Lane (Amy Adams) that ended with Martha transforming into J’onn — and then into Swanwick. “I was able to shoot all of it except for the Harry Lennix side,” Snyder wrote. “Was my intention to do that in LA.”
That shoot, of course, never materialized: Snyder left “Justice League” in the spring of 2017 and was replaced by Joss Whedon, and much of Snyder’s vision for the film — including Martian Manhunter — was cut out. After a massive grassroots campaign to #ReleasetheSnyderCut, however, WarnerMedia announced last May that Snyder was reconstructing his version of the movie into a four-hour epic. Over the summer, Lennix finally was able to shoot his side of Martian Manhunter’s introduction, using motion capture to embody J’onn’s massive green frame.
It’s the first time Martian Manhunter will appear in a live-action feature (David Harewood plays the role in the CW series “Supergirl”), and with “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” finally set for release on HBO Max on March 18, Variety reached out to Lennix to ask him about his unusual journey to the role.
Lennix is a busy guy: He’s currently shooting the eighth season of NBC’s “The Blacklist,” and in December, he announced plans to create the the Lillian Marcie Center and African American Museum of the Performing Arts in the South Side of Chicago. He’s worked for over 30 years as an actor — he’s set to voice a role in Snyder’s upcoming animated Netflix series “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas” — including two seasons on Whedon’s 2009-2010 Fox TV series “Dollhouse.”
So when Variety asked the 56-year-old to comment on the allegations by Ray Fisher that Whedon engaged in “abusive” and “unprofessional” behavior while working on “Justice League,” Lennix had a few things to say.
Did you first learn that Zack Snyder wanted to make Swanwick become Martian Manhunter when he posted that storyboard of the character in Oct. 2019?
I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what I found out. I don’t think there was any sort of advanced word. There are a lot of people who intuited it somehow, like fans bouncing that idea around. So I don’t know if somebody knew about it outside of Zack before that. But I did not know until I saw that storyboard.
So Zack didn’t give you any indication before he dropped that news?
No, he did not. From time to time, you know, Zack will text me things or email me things. I’ve certainly done projects with him, such as “Army of the Dead,” and I knew that was coming. But he likes to surprise me, and I think I’m not unique in that way. But, you know, there was no time that I could have found out about it that would have been a happier time.
After he dropped that news, did he call you to say, “Oh hey, by the way, I was gonna do this”?
No. The next call that I had from Zack was, “Hey, when can you come in and shoot?” So that was great. I found out that it was a possibility, or at least that Martian Manhunter was going to be in it, when he revealed through the storyboard that Martha Kent is coming by visiting Lois, and then after she leaves, she reveals herself to be, in fact, Calvin Swanwick, or the Martian Manhunter. That’s how I knew about it.
There’s a moment in “Man of Steel” where Swanwick asks Superman why he won’t reveal his identity as an alien that now feels very pointed in a way that obviously you hadn’t intended.
Yes, that’s true. And I think to some extent, that is what has sort of started the speculation [about Martian Manhunter], that Swanwick didn’t shrink away after Superman rather nonchalantly takes his handcuffs off and walks up to the window. This is now getting on to about nine years ago that we shot that scene. I think I asked Zack the question, “Am I going to shrink back here?” Because I’m a general, I’ve obviously faced danger.
And, he said, “No, in fact, you stand your ground, maybe even you move forward a little.” Perhaps that’s what got those wheels turning, that at least gave the suggestion that that might be a plausible reveal.
How much did you know about the character of Martian Manhunter before this became a thing?
Not much at all. I only knew that there was such a character. I’d heard through the fans of the DCEU that there were a couple of members of the Justice League that were not represented in the movie, and vaguely that one of those people was Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz. I didn’t know much about him at all.
How much do you think that he’s going to be in the movie?
I don’t know what’s going to be left on the floor, if any, but I didn’t shoot an inordinate amount. My work is not central, as it were, to the movie. It may be to a plot point. But I don’t think you’ll start talking about that character more than, say, Superman.
You said elsewhere that you would love for there to be a Martian Manhunter movie. Have you heard anything at all from Warner Bros. on that on that front?
Not one thing. I haven’t heard anything moved that needle toward an actuality. But why not?!
The reason there’s a Snyder Cut is because Zack was replaced by Joss Whedon on the movie. As you know, Ray Fisher has alleged that Joss engaged in misconduct during the shoot. You worked with Joss on two seasons of “Dollhouse,” so I wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on the matter?
I wasn’t there during the time in question. I am sorry that anybody had to experience what it was that was described. Obviously, there’s one side of the story that we’ve heard. I don’t know that Joss has made any comments. As you point out, I worked with Joss fairly closely for a couple of years there. I didn’t see that behavior, and at the same time, as an actor, my heart goes out to anybody that had to endure that kind of treatment. We get treated as a second-class citizens frequently. But I did not see it, and I would be curious as to what [Joss’s] response to this has been.
I just hope everybody can move on with their lives, to be honest with you. As a former seminarian, and as somebody who has made mistakes, I’ve been on either side of that equation. Directors sometimes are insensitive to the needs or the feelings of actors, and sometimes actors are needy, and sometimes they are oversensitive. I know I can be. So that said, I hope whatever it was that happened, that people could move on, and — outside of some unforgivable thing — that people can forgive, not just each other, but forgive themselves. To say, “Look, I may have made this mistake in the past, now I know better, and I’m going to do better.” This was a different time. What was tolerable, five years ago, a year ago, is no longer, and we have to adapt to that. I think there’s some of that going on, that this is generational in some way. I know that Ray has it in himself to be better because of this, to be stronger, to have survived it. And I also hope that Joss can, too, that he can survive it, be the writer and creator that that he is and we can all be better because of it.
You’re looking at this with more empathy than I would say many observers have in light of what Ray has alleged, and what actors on “Angel” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” alleged about Joss on Wednesday. Were you experiences with Joss purely professional?
Yes. Utterly professional. I didn’t see any of that kind of behavior that I’m hearing about. But I’m in a different place. That kind of thing is not likely to happen to me, just cause I’m a big Black guy from the South Side of Chicago, that people are a little more circumspect in however they might think about treating me or talking to me. I think maybe we should give [Joss] another chance to respond, to see what his side of the story is. Not minimizing anybody’s story, not minimizing the experiences others had in any way. But I believe that we must learn to reconcile. And we must learn to move on.
We wouldn’t be able to take this into a court, per se, not really. What I’ve learned over the years is that two people could be telling the absolute truth from their point of view, and disagree on what those salient points are. Whatever those salient points are, I think that everything that I have heard so far — and that’s not everything — is recoverable. And so to the extent that it’s recoverable, let’s recover from it and keep moving.
Joss hasn’t commented, Ray hasn’t gone public with almost any details about what he says happened on “Justice League,” and WarnerMedia hasn’t revealed what the company learned in its investigation. So figuring out how to move forward is complicated in the absence of detail.
I agree, 100%. What I’ve been able to glean from the stories and the back and forth, such as it is — mostly the forth — is that nasty things were said, mean, insensitive things were said, that made certain people uncomfortable. That’s certainly something I’m familiar with actors having to endure. Indeed, that’s part of the process. People say “no” to us for any number of reasons, or tell us to lose weight or gain it or get taller or shorter or younger. That’s just the nature of the business — it’s a personal business. I am of the opinion that this is entirely fixable, and that really what needs to happen is a dialogue. I mean, the old standard in American jurisprudence is you have a right to face your accuser and to respond. I think that people have the right to present both sides of the case. In fact, it’s not just a right, I think it’s an obligation. I wonder what’s going to happen.
The trailer looked like a Marvel movie, which I suppose isn't a bad thing, but those actors can't hold a candle to Marvels'. In fact, only the director is on that level.
I'll watch but I don't hold out too much hope.
I'll watch but I don't hold out too much hope.
Blame Snyder. He is the one revealing every damn thing to get this movie made. And he has this cult following now by fighting WB and then dedicating the movie to his daughter. Gonna be weird no matter if it's good or trash.
Well its getting close to the drop date and I hope its good. I did enjoy the original version but I understand the DC fans' gripes about it.
Zack Snyder's Justice League McFarlane Toys Action Figures Pre-Orders Are Live
Zack Snyder's Justice League will invade collectors' toy shelves thanks to McFarlane Toys' DC [...]
comicbook.com
Tom And Jerry Fans Gifted With an Accidental Sneak Peek at Zack Snyder’s Justice League
By Halle Kiefer@hallekiefer
Photo: HBO Max
Usually the only gifts Tom and Jerry leave behind are mouse-sized bespoke front doors and the smell of singed cat hair, so on Monday, they really came through in a big way. According to the Hollywood Reporter, some HBO Max users got a treat this afternoon, and no, we don’t mean the comedy stylings of Tom and Jerry star Colin Jost. When attempting to watch the new Warner Bros. comedy, instead of Tom and Jerry, some subscribers found themselves watching director Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated new version of Justice League, which is currently set to drop on the streaming platform March 18.
Per THR, several would-be Tom And Jerry viewers posted about the glitch on social media, including Twitter user Doug Bass, who snapped a screengrab of the four-hour film, of which he was able to watch one hour before getting an error message. Tweeted Bass, “Someone’s getting fired…Tom and Jerry this is not.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Aaron Couch and Ryan Parker were also able to watch the new Justice League as well, noting that, when they paused the film, HBO Max’s onscreen text insisted they were watching Tom And Jerry.
We, unfortunately, didn’t have such luck, and reportedly the mixup has since been rectified. Looks like the rest of us will have to wait another week and a half to finally see the The Snyder Cut. “‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League was temporarily available on HBO Max and the error was addressed within minutes,” a spokesperson from WarnerMedia told Variety, which noted that the film was up for at least an hour.
We’d like to blame The Joker for this pint-sized bit of chaos, but his shenanigans tend to be a little less whimsical and a little more existentially depraved, so we feel comfortable giving the credit to those lovable scams Tom and Jerry, and, of course, their good friend, Colin Jost.
By Halle Kiefer@hallekiefer
Photo: HBO Max
Usually the only gifts Tom and Jerry leave behind are mouse-sized bespoke front doors and the smell of singed cat hair, so on Monday, they really came through in a big way. According to the Hollywood Reporter, some HBO Max users got a treat this afternoon, and no, we don’t mean the comedy stylings of Tom and Jerry star Colin Jost. When attempting to watch the new Warner Bros. comedy, instead of Tom and Jerry, some subscribers found themselves watching director Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated new version of Justice League, which is currently set to drop on the streaming platform March 18.
Per THR, several would-be Tom And Jerry viewers posted about the glitch on social media, including Twitter user Doug Bass, who snapped a screengrab of the four-hour film, of which he was able to watch one hour before getting an error message. Tweeted Bass, “Someone’s getting fired…Tom and Jerry this is not.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Aaron Couch and Ryan Parker were also able to watch the new Justice League as well, noting that, when they paused the film, HBO Max’s onscreen text insisted they were watching Tom And Jerry.
We, unfortunately, didn’t have such luck, and reportedly the mixup has since been rectified. Looks like the rest of us will have to wait another week and a half to finally see the The Snyder Cut. “‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League was temporarily available on HBO Max and the error was addressed within minutes,” a spokesperson from WarnerMedia told Variety, which noted that the film was up for at least an hour.
We’d like to blame The Joker for this pint-sized bit of chaos, but his shenanigans tend to be a little less whimsical and a little more existentially depraved, so we feel comfortable giving the credit to those lovable scams Tom and Jerry, and, of course, their good friend, Colin Jost.
Damn that's wild it leaked hopefully some folks ripped it.
Zack Snyder's Justice League Darkseid Trailer Includes Green Lantern Footage
By CHARLIE RIDGELY - March 10, 2021 12:56 pm EST
comicbook.com
Following the tradition of the last week, Zack Snyder has revealed yet another short trailer for his upcoming cut of Justice League. In the weeks leading up to the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League, the director has been sharing teaser trailers focusing on individual characters, highlighting their importance to the film. On Wednesday, Justice League villains Steppenwolf and Darkseid got the spotlight, but they weren't the only characters worth noticing in the trailer. One of the previous Green Lanterns was given some more screen time in this latest bit of footage.
There was a Green Lantern featured in the theatrical cut of Justice League back in 2017, and they're shown battling for the safety of earth before being killed by Steppenwolf. The Green Lantern shown in this new footage is likely the same one, but it's in a shot we haven't seen before. Take a look!
Click Above Link To View Video
In Zack Snyder's Justice League, there's a chance we could learn a bit more about the identity of this Green Lantern, which was fighting for Earth the first time Steppenwolf attacked. Then again, it really might not matter in the long run. The more important piece of the story is where the ring goes after the Lantern is killed.
Even though the site of the Green Lantern in this trailer is awesome, the footage is still all about Steppenwolf and Darkseid, the latter of which was never in the theatrical version of the film. Snyder made sure he was included in his full cut, and still has plans for the villain going forward, if he's able to tell more story in the future.
"If you said to any of the actors in the movie 'well what happens in the movie' or 'what happens later' or whatever for any movie. And they go 'well I got the script and it's cool and I kind of know this and-' so [Ray Porter] and I were talking about this and what's cool or what's the right response to some questions," Snyder told The Nerd Queens. "It's a fair question to ask me, you know, like what do I say to the world about, you know, what happens when Darkseid comes to Earth? Then what? You know, Is that a thing? And I think, listen, the truth is that did I write and did I have and conceive a complete- do I know what happens when Darkseid... yes. I do know what happens. To say and to speculate about what that is and that that would be exciting, I think that's a fine thing."
Zack Snyder's Justice League arrives on HBO Max on March 18th.
By CHARLIE RIDGELY - March 10, 2021 12:56 pm EST
Zack Snyder's Justice League Darkseid Trailer Includes Green Lantern Footage
Following the tradition of the last week, Zack Snyder has revealed yet another short trailer for [...]
comicbook.com
Following the tradition of the last week, Zack Snyder has revealed yet another short trailer for his upcoming cut of Justice League. In the weeks leading up to the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League, the director has been sharing teaser trailers focusing on individual characters, highlighting their importance to the film. On Wednesday, Justice League villains Steppenwolf and Darkseid got the spotlight, but they weren't the only characters worth noticing in the trailer. One of the previous Green Lanterns was given some more screen time in this latest bit of footage.
There was a Green Lantern featured in the theatrical cut of Justice League back in 2017, and they're shown battling for the safety of earth before being killed by Steppenwolf. The Green Lantern shown in this new footage is likely the same one, but it's in a shot we haven't seen before. Take a look!
Click Above Link To View Video
In Zack Snyder's Justice League, there's a chance we could learn a bit more about the identity of this Green Lantern, which was fighting for Earth the first time Steppenwolf attacked. Then again, it really might not matter in the long run. The more important piece of the story is where the ring goes after the Lantern is killed.
Even though the site of the Green Lantern in this trailer is awesome, the footage is still all about Steppenwolf and Darkseid, the latter of which was never in the theatrical version of the film. Snyder made sure he was included in his full cut, and still has plans for the villain going forward, if he's able to tell more story in the future.
"If you said to any of the actors in the movie 'well what happens in the movie' or 'what happens later' or whatever for any movie. And they go 'well I got the script and it's cool and I kind of know this and-' so [Ray Porter] and I were talking about this and what's cool or what's the right response to some questions," Snyder told The Nerd Queens. "It's a fair question to ask me, you know, like what do I say to the world about, you know, what happens when Darkseid comes to Earth? Then what? You know, Is that a thing? And I think, listen, the truth is that did I write and did I have and conceive a complete- do I know what happens when Darkseid... yes. I do know what happens. To say and to speculate about what that is and that that would be exciting, I think that's a fine thing."
Zack Snyder's Justice League arrives on HBO Max on March 18th.
seems like if you paused it or what ever if got messed up
Zack Snyder's Justice League Darkseid Trailer Includes Green Lantern Footage
By CHARLIE RIDGELY - March 10, 2021 12:56 pm EST
Zack Snyder's Justice League Darkseid Trailer Includes Green Lantern Footage
Following the tradition of the last week, Zack Snyder has revealed yet another short trailer for [...]
Following the tradition of the last week, Zack Snyder has revealed yet another short trailer for his upcoming cut of Justice League. In the weeks leading up to the release of Zack Snyder's Justice League, the director has been sharing teaser trailers focusing on individual characters, highlighting their importance to the film. On Wednesday, Justice League villains Steppenwolf and Darkseid got the spotlight, but they weren't the only characters worth noticing in the trailer. One of the previous Green Lanterns was given some more screen time in this latest bit of footage.
There was a Green Lantern featured in the theatrical cut of Justice League back in 2017, and they're shown battling for the safety of earth before being killed by Steppenwolf. The Green Lantern shown in this new footage is likely the same one, but it's in a shot we haven't seen before. Take a look!
Click Above Link To View Video
In Zack Snyder's Justice League, there's a chance we could learn a bit more about the identity of this Green Lantern, which was fighting for Earth the first time Steppenwolf attacked. Then again, it really might not matter in the long run. The more important piece of the story is where the ring goes after the Lantern is killed.
Even though the site of the Green Lantern in this trailer is awesome, the footage is still all about Steppenwolf and Darkseid, the latter of which was never in the theatrical version of the film. Snyder made sure he was included in his full cut, and still has plans for the villain going forward, if he's able to tell more story in the future.
"If you said to any of the actors in the movie 'well what happens in the movie' or 'what happens later' or whatever for any movie. And they go 'well I got the script and it's cool and I kind of know this and-' so [Ray Porter] and I were talking about this and what's cool or what's the right response to some questions," Snyder told The Nerd Queens. "It's a fair question to ask me, you know, like what do I say to the world about, you know, what happens when Darkseid comes to Earth? Then what? You know, Is that a thing? And I think, listen, the truth is that did I write and did I have and conceive a complete- do I know what happens when Darkseid... yes. I do know what happens. To say and to speculate about what that is and that that would be exciting, I think that's a fine thing."
Zack Snyder's Justice League arrives on HBO Max on March 18th.
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