Justice League Director Zack Snyder Says He Fought With Warner Bros. Over Snyder Cut Ending

The HBO Max release of Zack Snyder's Justice League not only saw the filmmaker's original vision [...]

The HBO Max release of Zack Snyder's Justice League not only saw the filmmaker's original vision for the film largely restored, but also offered him the opportunity to film additional sequences for adventure, with one specific interaction in the film's epilogue initially being shot down by the studio, with Snyder going ahead and making it happen anyway. Given the nature of this encounter in the film, it's easy to see why the executives might have initially been wary about what that would potentially mean for the franchise's future, with Snyder recently detailing that he went ahead and filmed the sequence despite pushback from the studio.

WARNING: Spoilers below for the epilogue of Zack Snyder's Justice League

In one of the film's final sequences, Ben Affleck's Batman and Jared Leto's Joker have an exchange in Bruce Wayne's "Knightmare," which the studio wasn't interested in exploring.

"The Batman and Joker relationship is so element to both characters, and if I never make another DC film, I felt it was rude not to have done a scene with the two of them," Snyder explained to Yahoo!. "Originally the studio said, 'Now we don't want that,' but I was like, 'I'm going to do it anyway.' I was going to put up some green screens and shoot it in my backyard, but we didn't have to do that in the end."

Despite finally getting to see these versions of these two characters being one of the favorite moments of the film among fans, it's understandable why there might have been complications from the studio's perspective.

Looking to the future, Robert Pattinson has been tapped to embrace the Caped Crusader in the upcoming The Batman from Matt Reeves, while Joaquin Phoenix won an Oscar for starring in 2019's Joker. Given that this exchange wasn't filmed for the original endeavor, it's likely that the studio merely wanted to allow Snyder to reconstruct what he already filmed as opposed to crafting new material, especially when the tease of this relationship was confirmed to not be seen again in a future project. However, with fans getting their first glimpses at Affleck's Batman and Leto's Joker back in 2016, this encounter felt like it was five years in the making, so some audiences would likely rather have had any interaction between the characters as opposed to nothing at all.

Zack Snyder's Justice League is now streaming on HBO Max.

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