Justice League: New WarnerMedia Boss Is Liking Tweets About Releasing the Snyder Cut

Newly-appointed WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar is taking note of fans’ requests to release Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of Justice League. The film, which was a critical and financial bomb for Warner Bros., marks Snyder’s final (at least for now) DC Comics movie, following Watchmen, Man of Steel, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. He parted ways with WB during production, shortly after the death of his daughter. Marvel’s The Avengers filmmaker Joss Whedon stepped in to do some reshoots, and then cut and assemble the film, which was trimmed down from over 200 minutes to exactly two hours, reportedly as a result of studio demands.

On Twitter today, Kilar — who formerly headed up Hulu before taking the WarnerMedia job — got noticed for “liking” the inevitable sea of “Release the Snyder Cut” tweets sent his way by fans who take essentially every opportunity to carpet-bomb WB with the request. There’s something of a catch, though.

Of the two that he liked so far, one of them is congratulating him on getting the job, and adding, “Now #ReleasetheSnyderCut.” The second is just a screenshot of Kilar’s “like” of the first with added commentary that Kilar knows what he’s doing. Given that the executive has been going through Twitter liking a number of “congratulations” and praise for his past work, it’s entirely possible that he’s not so much taking sides on the Snyder Cut issue as he is just catching some of those in a pretty wide net.

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 not huge — in part because Donner was fired from the movie early enough in the production that he did not have all of his shots yet. Snyder, it seems, had a pretty complete movie (plus or minus a few scenes that don’t seem intrinsic to the main plot).

Still, what exists is likely an assembly cut — with little in the way of finishe visual effects and pretty loose editing. This is the cut that would have been assembled (get it?) to give studio executives a chance to see what the movie they had just sunk $200 million-plus into was shaping up to be. In the time since the movie’s release, Snyder supporters, including cast and crew who worked on his films, have intimated that he may have completed some or all of the post-production work needed to make the film audience-ready.

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.