There’s been a lot of debate about Justice League, from the directorial approach, to the visual effects, to just how long the movie’s runtime is.
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While the runtime debates have been somewhat trivial — do we really have to argue about whether it’s 119 or 121 minutes? — there’s actually a topic worth discussing wrapped up in the irrelevant parts of the debate.
Here’s why Justice League‘s runtime actually matters.
A Tale of Two Directors
The first reason why Justice League‘s runtime matters has to do with the looming question over whose film, exactly, the theatrical version will be.
Ever since Joss Whedon stepped in to handle reshoots and rewrites of Justice League following Zack Snyder leaving the film due to personal reasons, there’s been constant speculation from fans that the film has been essentially transformed into a Joss Whedon film. The Justice League cast and crew and Warner Bros. executives have all maintained a united front that the film is still very much Snyder’s film, but the runtime tells a distinctly different story.
Of the four DC Comics movies that Snyder has directed (300, Watchmen, Man of Steel, Batman v Superman) only 300 clocked in at two hours. That two-hour runtime was almost entirely due to the short length of the source material that inspired the film. Snyder had to actually add scenes to the comic to create a feature-length movie.
While Whedon’s Avengers films are both two hours and twenty-plus minutes long, the director isn’t known for telling long-winded stories in the same way that Snyder does. There were also rumors early this year that Justice League was originally close to three hours long, like the original theatrical cut of BvS that later became the “Ultimate Edition”, though Snyder himself denied that.
The Next BvS…
The fan trepidation over this issue isn’t hard to understand: DC fans do not (nay, cannot) want another Batman v Superman experience.
Justice League‘s two-hour runtime seems out of step with not just Snyder’s work, but the DC Films format as a whole. Only Suicide Squad has clocked in at two hours, and we later found out just how badly that film had been whittled down by WB. The same holds true for Batman v Superman, as the differences in content (and runtime) between Snyder’s full vision and the studio theatrical cut were pretty profound.
That leaves us in a place where fans are justifiably worried that the same has happened to Justice League: the studio being unhappy with Snyder’s cut, but rather than leaving it to the editors and their blades, they brought in Whedon to salvage the useful parts of Snyder’s cut, and to pad that with reshoot fillers.
While that’s all just speculation and worry on the part of fans, it does remain to be seen how Justice League can introduce all of its heroes, villains, DC Cinematic Universe backstory, and meaningful thematic arc and conflict in the span of just two hours. It’s definitely an important question, and hopefully Justice League is the outlier that beats the traditional odds in this situation (a bad movie cut down for more viewer turnover that fails to impress).
We’ll find out if the cynics or optimists are right when Justice League hits theaters on November 17th.
[Embed id=52193]Justice League (ComicMovie: justice-league-part-one)[/Embed]
