In the years since Justice League hit theaters in 2017, filmmaker Zack Snyder has offered hints at how he had hoped to deliver audiences a comic-accurate resurrection for Clark Kent, mainly by giving the Kryptonian his well-known black suit, with Snyder also recently confirming that he had toyed with giving Clark Kent a beard and mullet. In the early ’90s, DC Comics killed off Superman, only to ultimately bring him back to life, with that narrative confirming his hair had grown out in his time away from Earth, but Snyder noted that Warner Bros. wasn’t interested in pursuing this look for the hero.
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“We actually talked about it a lot, and I was a slight advocate — a little bit, for the mullet — but I think that there was no way to go back from that and at the time the studio was really leaning on me pretty hard,” Snyder revealed to YouTuber Tyrone Magnus. “There was just … I was lucky to be able to figure it out, so I could get the black suit … I had done a lot of research before, so we knew how to turn the color suit black. “
In the theatrically released film, Superman is brought back to life and grapples with Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg, and The Flash with his shirt off until Lois Lane arrives to calm him down. While even Snyder admitted that it would have been a tougher sell to depict Superman with a mullet, a popular haircut in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he went on to note that even the idea of a comic-accurate black suit was something the studio wasn’t interested in exploring.
“I always said I’d shoot the colored suit, but it’s a mistake,” the filmmaker continued. “I’m just saying it out loud to you guys, this is bullsh-t. And so they were like, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about, nobody wants a black suit, let’s just do the colors.’ And so, you know, I thought like, ‘look, in post, you guys are going to change your minds.’ But, here we are with the black suit. Yeah, the beard and the long hair, that was gonna be… there was no way to undo that. We saw how that went last time they tried to do it.”
Funnily enough, the theatrically released version of Justice League was mocked for the fact that reshoots were filmed with Cavill sporting a mustache, having begun production on Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which required Warner Bros. to attempt to digitally erase his facial hair, with most fans feeling as though the erasure was ineffective.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League hits HBO Max on March 18th.
Do you wish Superman had a mullet and beard? Let us know in the comments below!
