Justice League - Review Thread

ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE Will Be Made Available Worldwide In All Markets Day And Date With The US On Thursday, March 18

The feature film will be available in each market via one of the following distribution options – PVOD, PEST, EST, SVOD, TVOD, HBO linear and on HBO Go (in HBO Europe and HBO Asia territories), or via a local TV provider. Additional details for each specific market will be shared in the upcoming weeks.

The Whedon Cut of Justice League is like a serviceable empty shell of a movie, like a hollow chocolate Easter bunny.

The movie we got wasn't a simple edit down. Over half the movie was reshot probably to make it less Batman v Superman and more Avengers. The Snyder Cut will likely have similar plot beats, but less restrained, for better or worse (arguably it could be both at the same time).

Whether one is anticipating it or not, this is more or less the same situation as Superman II, only this time it didn't take 25 years to try and make something coherent out of dumped footage. Curiosity about it is fully understandable, but I fully expect it to suck as much as a normal Zack Snyder movie.

Zack Snyder, the director of Justice League, has never seen Justice League. His name is in the credits as the filmmaker, but he’s never sat through the version released to the world three years ago. His wife, Deborah, who produced the movie, advised him not to.

In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just…it’s a weird experience,” she says now. “I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”

After their private screening of the Whedon cut, Nolan and Deborah Snyder emerged into the light with a shared mission. “They came and they just said, ‘You can never see that movie,’” Zack Snyder says during lunch at his Pasadena office, a modernist series of cubes jutting from a hillside that overlooks the Rose Bowl.

“Because I knew it would break his heart,” his wife adds.

What happened to Justice League was a crisis of infinite doubt: a team of executives who lost faith in the architect of their faltering comic book movie empire, and a director in the midst of a family tragedy that sapped him of the will to fight. Joss Whedon, a director from another universe, the Marvel Cinematic one, left the Avengers after two movies and crossed over to comics rival DC, picking up Justice League not where Snyder left off, but remaking it significantly with extensive rewrites and hurried reshoots, just as the studio demanded.

On November 17, 2017, the team-up between Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Cyborg, Aquaman, and The Flash didn’t so much debut in theaters as crash into them. It was sneered at by critics, shrugged at by baffled moviegoers, and all but disowned by those who created it. Whedon has since been accused of unprofessional and abusive behavior on set. (The director declined repeated requests for a comment.) He left his name off the movie except to claim a shared writing credit with Chris Terrio, who had written Snyder’s previous installment, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Publicly, everyone close to the movie practiced their smiles and rehearsed their talking points in the hopes of doing no further damage to the project, not that it helped much. The movie earned $657 million globally, which sounds like a lot of money until you consider the nearly $300 million budget, including the reported $25 million for Whedon’s reworking, plus a conservative estimate of $100 million to $150 million in marketing costs. Factor in the sizable cut theaters take from the box office, and a return of only $657 million is a clear money loser. Six months later, Justice League’s box office was dwarfed by Marvel’s own all-star showcase Avengers: Infinity War, which flexed its muscles at $2 billion.

The official story was that the Snyders were voluntarily leaving the movie due to their family tragedy, and that Zack had handpicked Whedon to complete the movie he had planned. Only half of that was true.

Harsh reviews for Batman v Superman demolished Warner Bros.’ confidence in Snyder. Even the director’s champions, like production head Greg Silverman, were worried. “When Batman v Superman came out and we did get a negative reaction from the fans, it was disheartening for all of us,” says Silverman, now the founder and head of independent content company Stampede Ventures. “Zack had made these movies, like 300, that were such crowd-pleasers. And that was our job—to make crowd-pleasers. And here, we have made a movie together, and it didn’t really please the audience.”

Marvel Studios movies, whose success exerted so much pressure on the DC team, hit on a formula that mirrored their comic book roots—telling stories about relatable, everyday people grappling with sudden phenomenal powers. Snyder’s DC universe approached its superheroes from the opposite direction, depicting gods and immortals who are at ease wielding cosmic strengths but strain to be human and connect to the ordinary world. The director envisioned this as operatic, tragic, and perhaps a more challenging type of comic book storytelling, but Warner Bros. feared it made his heroes gloomy, their abilities a curse.

Diane Nelson, who was president of DC Entertainment at the time, says she appreciated that Snyder was more into deconstructing the familiar than just recapitulating it. “Zack is a masterful visual storyteller who goes deep on individual characters,” she says. “For some people, that is amazing, and for other people that becomes the problem because they have fixed opinions about who these DC characters are and are not.”

In 2016, as principal photography got under way on Justice League in the United Kingdom, rumors percolated that Snyder had been fired from the film. That didn’t happen, but Warner Bros.’ then chairman and CEO, Kevin Tsujihara, did assign watchdogs in the form of DC Entertainment creative chief Geoff Johns and Warner Bros. co-production head Jon Berg. The edict was clear: At least one of them had to be on the set every day.

Berg, who’s now production president at Stampede, recalls that duty as a low point. “It was really tricky and not a position that I loved, to be honest,” he says. “I tried to be forthright about what I thought creatively. My job was to try to mediate between a creator whose vision is instinctually dark and a studio that perceived, rightly or wrong, that the fans wanted something lighter. I was respectful of the director and didn’t pursue things that were coming at me from the corporate side that I thought weren’t in line with what would make the best movie.”

Snyder knew why Johns and Berg were on the set. “You could say babysit,” he says. Many filmmakers would have bristled at the intrusion, but he was gracious. “It didn’t bother me too much because they weren’t that threatening. I just felt the ideas they did have, where they were trying to inject humor and stuff like that, it wasn’t anything that was too outrageous.”

But Warner Bros. did nix some of his more sweeping notions for Justice League, like adding a romance between Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Amy Adams’s Lois Lane, who was mourning Superman’s death in the previous film. “The intention was that Bruce fell in love with Lois and then realized that the only way to save the world was to bring Superman back to life,” says Snyder. “So he had this insane conflict, because Lois, of course, was still in love with Superman. We had this beautiful speech where [Bruce] said to Alfred: ‘I never had a life outside the cave. I never imagined a world for me beyond this. But this woman makes me think that if I can get this group of gods together, then my job is done. I can quit. I can stop.’ And of course that doesn’t work out for him.”

It didn’t work out for Snyder either. The studio said no.

The downside of making epics is the studios’ financial expectations. For Justice League, Warner Bros. wanted a big, round billion dollars in global box office, which Snyder’s movies had never reached. In January 2017, the director showed his first cut to Tsujihara. It did not go well, according to Snyder and others. (Tsujihara, who resigned from Warner Bros. in 2019 amid a sexual misconduct scandal involving the aspiring actress Charlotte Kirk, declined an interview request.)

Among the issues was the length of the film. “There was a mandate from Tsujihara that the movie be two hours long,” says Snyder. That order had a paradoxical impact, because it meant eliminating much of the heart and humor the studio also wanted, like a comical romantic subplot between Ezra Miller’s Flash and Kiersey Clemons’s Iris, the latter of whom was absent entirely from the Whedon film. (On the day Vanity Fair visited his office, Snyder was working on finalizing the music for the restored scene in which The Flash rescues her from a car crash.)

Snyder also saw a bigger structural problem with the “make it shorter” order: “How am I supposed to introduce six characters and an alien with potential for world domination in two hours? I mean, I can do it, it can be done. Clearly it was done,” he says, referring to Whedon’s version. “But I didn’t see it.”

Reports that Snyder himself asked Whedon for help were false. Johns, one of the studio-appointed babysitters, had been planning a Batgirl movie with Whedon, and Snyder and others say Johns recruited him to do rewrites for Justice League. (Johns’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Once again, Snyder was gracious and even hopeful: “I thought maybe he could write some cool scenes. I thought that would be fun.”

Soon, it became clear that Warner Bros. was giving Whedon more and more power. He would not just advise during reshoots, but also do some directing himself. Snyder says he only had one conversation with Whedon, about the studio’s notes. Reeling from Autumn’s death—and finding anguish in their work rather than relief—Zack and Deborah quit. “We just lost the will to fight that fight in a lot of ways,” says Zack. “All of us, the whole family, we’re just so broken by [losing Autumn] that having those conversations in the middle of it really became…I was like, ‘Really?’ Frankly I think we did the right thing because I think it would’ve been either incredibly belligerent or we just rolled over.”

One by one, he called members of his cast and crew. “I remember I was in a movie theater, coincidentally enough,” Ray Fisher said on the set of Snyder’s reshoots last fall. “I was walking into the AMC right in Times Square. And I got the call from Zack and he was saying that he had to deal with stuff with the fam and he was having to step away. I had a trillion questions. My heart sank.”

Whedon rewrote and reshot about three quarters of Justice League, from what Snyder can gather. When fans ask him about details of the movie that bears his name, he usually has no idea what they are talking about. Worst of all, for Warner Bros., Whedon didn’t exactly save the movie. “When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” says a studio executive, who requested anonymity. “The robber on the rooftop—so goofy and awful. The Russian family—so useless and pointless. Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.”

Justice League opened on November 17, 2017, and cratered. Because Cavill had been making Mission: Impossible Fallout during the reshoots, Whedon’s team had to digitally erase his mustache in Justice League, which led to a bizarre warping of his face. The jokes fell flat. And behind the scenes, some of the cast had revolted.

Fisher has publicly claimed Whedon was abusive on set, and that Warner Bros. executives “enabled” his actions. Gadot told the Los Angeles Times that she also had a negative experience with Whedon, which she reported to higher-ups. After concluding its investigation, Warner Bros. announced that “remedial action” had been taken, though the studio didn’t offer specifics. Days before that announcement, HBO, a division of WarnerMedia, parted ways with Whedon on the sci-fi series The Nevers. Fisher continues to clash with the studio and has expressed dismay at the outcome of its investigation.

“[The cast] were very loyal to Zack, and they were hurting for him,” says Nelson, the former DC president. “It would have been a difficult environment for any new director to walk into—I have no doubt about that. But then how Joss chose to handle that is Joss’s to live with.”

At a time of stories of abusive creators, Snyder is an anomaly. Even executives who were sometimes at odds with him agree that he’s genuinely nice. “I’d be stronger than that,” says Silverman. “He’s a wonderful guy and fostered a wonderful working environment on his sets. He really valued the crew. He valued his cast.”

November 2019 brought a sustained hashtag push on Twitter, which Snyder promoted. Gadot and Affleck were now calling for his cut to be released, too. A few days later, Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros. Picture Group, called Snyder with an offer: Let’s try again. “A lot of the people at the company, myself included, always felt badly that Zack didn’t get to finish his vision of this film because of the circumstances,” says Emmerich. “And so if there was a way to make it logistically and financially possible, which HBO Max did, and Zack had a willingness to do it, it seemed like a win for everybody.”

Snyder estimates that it cost around $70 million to undo Whedon’s redo. For that, HBO Max gets four hours of hotly anticipated programming—and the Hollywood comeback story of a lifetime. Snyder himself gets nothing. “I’m not getting paid,” he says. He was paid the first time, of course. This time, he wants creative control, and forgoing a fee helped. “I didn’t want to be beholden to anyone, and it allowed me to keep my negotiating powers with these people pretty strong.”

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