In May of 2020 it was made official, WarnerMedia confirmed that Zack Snyder’s Justice League would finally see the light of day and it would be exclusive to their freshly launched HBO Max streaming service. Speaking in a new interview, producer Deborah Snyder opened up about the process of completing the extended cut of the film (famously costing upwards of $70 million) and the many hurdles that they were forced to jump through from the time the decision was made in November of 2019. Like so many others, Snyder said that “Never in our wildest dreams did we think” this version of the film would be released, but with the studio committing now they had the will to fight for it to be done right.
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Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter that at first the studio told them they couldn’t offer any money to finish it, to which they said it was so unfinished that they couldn’t risk putting it out in that state. To that end they worked with their visual effects supervisor and producers to conceive what it would cost to complete the film and “see if it was even possible.” Not long after that the COVID-19 pandemic would spread across the world and result in shut downs, prompting the studio to think that this would mark the nail in the coffin for the Snyder Cut.
“They were like, ‘Oh, that’s that,’” Snyder said. “And I was like, ‘No! the opposite.’ We can do this remotely and all these artists, we can keep them employed for a time. Then, to finish 2,650 visual effects shots, took some money. So we had to also convince them that it was worth it. CAA helped us put together some analytics of what our social reach was throughout the #SnyderCut campaign. We compared that to the top shows on Netflix, so we could then make the comparison of what the power of this fanbase was and how that translated into subscribers for HBO Max. Looking at it that way, gave it a why. When they were like, ‘Well, we don’t want to spend the money on this’ and then you are like ‘OK, but, you do see there’s an upside.’”
She continued, “Then it was like, ‘We’ve got to pull this off.’ Originally we wanted a year. We just did a big visual effects movie (Army of the Dead) that had 1,100 visual effects shots and we had the course of a year-and-a-half to work on that. Here we had to deliver a brand new score, four-hours worth, and over 2,600 visual effects shots in six, seven months’ time. It was an enormous undertaking.
Snyder confirmed that the March premiere of the film was a mandate by the studio which meant that their final pass on the visual effects would need to be done in December and their sound mix completed in November, including the new score by composer Tom Holkenborg.
“That’s a lot of new music that was required,” Snyder concluded. “It was so much fun and I think for everybody it was such a cathartic experience. Everyone was so happy to be on the journey. So much of the visual effects and the look of the film and even some of the character designs were changed from the original version. They were so happy to able to go back to their original intent.”
All four hours of Zack Snyder‘s Justice League will be available to stream on HBO Max on March 18.
