Zack Snyder Reveals Why He Won’t Take a Paycheck To Finish Justice League for HBO Max

With Zack Snyder’s Justice League less than a month away from debuting on HBO Max, Zack Snyder confirms he’s not receiving a paycheck for finishing the project. Speaking to Vanity Fair for a feature about the production and release of the Snyder Cut, Snyder says, “I’m not getting paid. I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, and it allowed me to keep my negotiating powers with these people pretty strong.” This confirmation and explanation echo previous comments from Snyder, having stated on a YouTube stream that, “It’s exciting to get this chance, and I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and I love working on it, and I’d do it for free – and I am.”

Snyder’s willingness to work for free to finish the project is a contrast from a statement by HBO Max’s executive head Bob Greenblatt about the project’s cost. “It isn’t as easy as going into the vault, and there’s a Snyder Cut sitting there to put out,” Greenblatt said last May. “It does not exist. Zack is actually building it, and it’s complex, including new VFX shots. It’s a radical rethinking of that movie, and it’s complicated and wildly expensive. I’ll just say I wish it was just 30 million and stop there. It’s an enormous undertaking and very complex.”

Cost and payment aside, Snyder has said he never expected to finish the Snyder cut in any form. “It was an interesting experience,” Snyder said in another YouTube stream. “I got to say I never really thought it would happen. I’d been living with the prospect that it would never happen and fine with it. I’ll be honest. I’d made peace with the fact that this was the world I was going to be in. It was going to be a situation where this was a movie that I never really finished. I have my cut of it here at the house, and if you want to see when you’re over, you can check it out, but that’s pretty much it. But when we got to the point where, through a lot of hurdles and back and forth, that we’d come to the place where yes, the movie, you’re allowed to finish it and to do it the right way, that was a pretty cathartic and beautiful moment that I shared with my family; it was really an impossible dream come true.”

In Zack Snyder’s Justice League, determined to ensure Superman’s (Henry Cavill) ultimate sacrifice was not in vain, Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) aligns forces with Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) with plans to recruit a team of metahumans to protect the world from an approaching threat of catastrophic proportions. The task proves more difficult than Bruce imagined, as each of the recruits must face the demons of their own pasts to transcend that which has held them back, allowing them to come together, finally forming an unprecedented league of heroes. Now united, Batman (Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and The Flash (Ezra Miller) may be too late to save the planet from Steppenwolf, DeSaad and Darkseid and their dreadful intentions.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League will debut on March 18th on HBO Max.