When Zack Snyder joined the DC Extended Universe, he approached the project from a grounded vantage point, putting a grittier skew on his films in the franchise. Because he made his superhero stories as grounded as possible, he and the other filmmakers on the projects often wondered how to explain the idea of magic and godly powers. According to Snyder himself, this led to the thought process of turning the gods—namely, Zeus—into Kryptonians, effectively turning Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) into a member of the alien race as well.
“[We thought] Zeus could possibly be Kryptonian so that Wonder Woman’s powers…anyway, you can sort of see where that’s going,” Snyder said at a fan Q&A event on Friday. “The whole thing of whether or not magic or gods…there’s a version of where you’re like ‘That’s cool, I guess,’ then there’s the scientific aspect. You have the pathology of wondering where gods come from. We had played around with that quite a bit.”
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The idea of gods was further explored in Snyder’s cut of Justice League, which featured Darkseid and the New Gods in a much heftier role than the film’s theatrical release.
“If you said to any of the actors in the movie ‘well what happens in the movie’ or ‘what happens later’ or whatever for any movie. And they go ‘well I got the script and it’s cool and I kind of know this and-‘ so [Ray Porter] and I were talking about this and what’s cool or what’s the right response to some questions,” Snyder previously said of Ray Porter’s Darkseid portrayal.
He added, “It’s a fair question to ask me, you know, like what do I say to the world about, you know, what happens when Darkseid comes to Earth? Then what? You know, Is that a thing? And I think, listen, the truth is that did I write and did I have and conceive a complete- do I know what happens when Darkseid… yes. I do know what happens. To say and to speculate about what that is and that that would be exciting, I think that’s a fine thing.”
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is now streaming on HBO Max.
