Subway restaurants will donate 15,000 sandwiches to hungry families this holiday season after a social media campaign kicked off by Zack Snyder fans. After asking how many retweets it would take for Subway to donate 10,000 sandwiches, the chain quote-tweeted the fan and said 5,000 retweets in five hours. About two hours later, there were over 5,500 retweets, prompting the company to increase the donation amount given how fast the goal was met. And while that initial quote-tweet might not have been an explicit endorsement of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut (it really was just answering the “how many retweets?” question), the new message was pretty explicitly courting the support of the Snyder fans behind the viral hashtag campaign.
Besides tweeting #ReleaseTheSnyderCut themselves, Subway also made an inside joke about the cut. They congratulated the fans on passing 5,000 retweets in “less than 214 minutes,” the recently-revealed length of Snyder’s director’s cut of Justice League.
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You can see the tweet below.
So you’re fast… and since you did it in under 214 minutes we are going to up the donation to 15,000 subs! And oh yeah, #ReleaseTheSnyderCut https://t.co/NiWWwOx9LW
— Subway® (@SUBWAY) December 6, 2019
Subway is not entirely new to fan campaigns. Back when Chuck (starring DCEU actor Zachary Levi) was on the air, the restaurant was an advertiser on the show. Inundated with restaurant comment cards that said Chuck had been the impetus for the customer’s visit, Subway picked up what Chuck fans were putting down and worked with NBC to save the show via a sponsorship deal.
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.