Justice League Snyder Cut Runtime Revealed to Be Over 3 Hours Long

After comment from Man of Steel star Henry Cavill reignited the controversy about whether the “Snyder Cut” exists, and if so what form it is in, filmmaker Zack Snyder yesterday released a shot of some film canisters along with a caption suggesting that “of course” his director’s cut exists. Snyder, in doing so, also confirmed for hardcore fans that the runtime of the “director’s cut” of Justice League is over 3 hours long. The image, which you can see below, features a runtime — 214 minutes, or just over three and a half hours. That is roughly in line with longstanding rumors about the film’s content.

Snyder’s “director’s cut,” were it ever to be revealed, would be probably the biggest change from one cut to another of basically any major motion picture ever released. For context, it seems like about 90% of the content in Snyder’s movie never found its way to theaters, whereas even when Richard Donner did his cut of Superman II for the home video market 20 years after its original theatrical release, the difference was somewhere between 20 and 30% of the footage.

You can check out Snyder’s Vero post below.

Justice League Part One and Part Two were announced at the same time, with filmmaker Zack Snyder supposedly filming them back to back. That did not last long, though. Snyder eventually, famously, either left Justice League or was forced out shortly after the death of his daughter. But even before that, a set visit during production on the film included quotes that indicated that Part Two was not guaranteed to happen, and might not happen with Snyder even if it did. Conventional wisdom says that before he exited the movie, the plan was to build a trilogy of films, but even at its most bullish, Warner Bros. only announced the two before things started to change.

When Justice League was released in 2017, with Snyder as the sole credited director of the movie but everyone knowing that Joss Whedon had overseen significant reshoots and dramatically cut the film back from its original runtime to meet studio demands, the film was relatively well received — as long as the bar you are using for that statement is the one set by other DC movies, which up to that point had been largely hated by critics and divisive among fans.

Its poor box office performance cemented what many fans already expected: Snyder was done with DC films for the foreseeable future, and Justice League Part Two was shelved indefinitely. It seems that the best, if not only, chance to see new, Snyder-directed DC content for the foreseeable future would be if Warners releases a the Snyder cut of Justice League — regardless of how long a shot that might be.