After posting a link to buy a t-shirt supporting the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention earlier today, filmmaker Zack Snyder replied to a fan question in a way that seems to say the 214-minute director’s cut of Justice League is closer to complete than anyone previously thought. While Snyder is known to have screened an assembly (read: very early and unfinished) cut of the film for Warner Bros. executives before he left the project in early 2017, it has long been widely accepted that any complete “Snyder Cut” would likely have, among other more minor issues, incomplete computer graphics. Apparently not, according to Snyder.
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On the social network Vero earlier today, a user named after Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck from Joker asked Snyder to comment on the film, saying that he had “argued with a lot of fans that say your JL isn’t finished (cgi), is it?” Snyder replied “Yes.”
The first thing to say here is that it might have been easy for Snyder to overlook the parenthetical “CGI” and just answer that the film was completed, something he has already said in the past. So don’t get too excited. That said, he did give a direct answer to a direct question, and it is a surprising one if true.
Recently, the Folding Ideas YouTube channel offered a look at the “Snyder Cut” phenomenon, discussing several theories along the way. One of the things that host Dan Olson brought up is the possibility that Snyder had self-funded all or some of the post-production that was not yet completed when he left the project at Warner Bros. Given the nature of the conversation around the film over the last couple of years, that seems like the most plausible explanation if indeed it he is saying it is now complete.
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.
