One Marvel Director Wants a Snyder Cut-Style Do-Over

Alan Taylor, the Game of Thrones and Terminator: Genisys filmmaker whose Thor: The Dark World is often cited as one of the worst movies in Marvel's shared universe, wants a chance to assemble a director's cut, which he says would be superior to the version released in theaters. The filmmaker, who is doing press for his new Sopranos sequel The Many Saints of Newark, is the first Marvel director to speak openly about any kind of studio interference, with filmmakers like James Gunn frequently shooting down the "director's cut" idea by saying that what they released in theaters is exactly what they hoped to release.

In the case of Taylor, he says in a new interview that he was rooting for Snyder to succeed, and that Thor: The Dark World was a radically different movie after studio-mandated edits than it would have been otherwise. Still, as much as he might like to, he does not expect to get the opportunity to "fix" the movie.

"I was cheering for Zack Snyder when he was doing that and thinking, 'Will he pull this off?'" Taylor told Inverse. "This is amazing. I think every director was kind of rooting for that. I would love to, I mean to. Can you imagine that? They give me however many millions of dollars they gave him to go back in. Yeah, I don't think I'm going to get that phone call."

Elsewhere in the interview, Taylor elaborated, "I focused all my attention on making a certain movie, and then in the editing process, decisions were made to change it a lot. My regret was that the movie that got released was changed quite a bit. I have a great fondness for some of the things that went away in the original cut. There was a kind of quality a wonder to the thing that was beautiful to me."

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. In 2020, HBO Max announced that they would release Zack Snyder's Justice League, a four-hour epic that used virtually all of Snyder's filmed footage. It was released on the streaming platform in February, and hit DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K UHD earlier this month.

Thor: The Dark World had issues from the start: the movie almost went forward with Patty Jenkins directing, but she ultimately left after she and the studio didn't see eye to eye on a script. She went on to direct Wonder Woman instead, which made about $200 million more at the box office than the Thor sequel did, and was one of the best-reviewed comic book movies ever made. 

You can see Thor: The Dark World and other Marvel movies On Disney+, and Zack Snyder's Justice League on HBO Max.

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