With the ending of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice featuring the death of Superman, this provided a number of narrative complications for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, especially in regards to how the figures closest to the Man of Steel coped with his death. Snyder himself recently recalled how, in one version of the project’s script, Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane formed a relationship together, so when Clark Kent ultimately returned, it understandably caused some complications for the newfound relationship. The filmmaker noted that this was one of many concepts that his collaborators seemingly shot down, despite the inherent storytelling potential and complications that would come with it.
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“I think in the original script, Lois and Batman got together briefly,” Snyder shared on AGBO’s Pizza Film School. “There was this whole other thing, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, my God, you can’t do that.’ Because Superman was dead and Lois is a pretty amazing person. Her part in Justice League is really — especially since I had Amy [Adams], and Amy’s like, a genius, I really felt like we should lean on Amy because she’s just a great actress, a force of nature … And then I loved the idea of setting up this concept, like in the movie where the husband goes off to war and he’s dead and the wife moves on and then the husband appears, like, ‘I’m not dead, I’m fine,’ how do you deal with that? I was super into that concept, that, ‘Oh, no, Superman can be brought back to life.’”
Snyder added, “So now what happens with this? And it was that Lois was like, ‘I’m still in love with Superman, you were a thing,’ but then, at that point, Batman had already fallen in love with Lois.”
With Justice League set to bring the iconic superhero group into live-action for the first time on the big screen, there was a lot of pressure and expectations on how to go about such a feat. Understandably, from the conception of the project to what was released in theaters, and then to Zack Snyder’s Justice League being released on HBO Max, the project underwent a number of changes.ย
While the theatrical cut of Justice League offered Lois only a few minutes of screen time, the four-hour run time of Zack Snyder’s Justice League restored some of Lois’ scenes, though her role was still reduced from her involvement in previous DC films.
James Gunn is now spearheading the future of DC Studios, making it unlikely that any components from Snyder’s vision of the DC Extended Universe will be carried into new projects.
Would you have liked to have seen this relationship unfold in Justice League? Let us know in the comments!