Warner Bros. Wish Zack Snyder’s Justice League Never Happened
Warner Bros has been looking at its past and current mistakes, likely to figure out where things went wrong, and the studio believes Zack Snyder's Justice League was a mistake.
“Don’t mess with the fandom” should be the number one rule at any studio hoping to bring a piece of comic book property to on-screen form. From Marvel to DC and even Prime Video with their take on the satirical superhero series The Boys, fans will rally around their beloved superhero stories. Fans will dissect everything, including the big names added to ensure that comic properties are as true to the source material as possible. Marvel has, for the most part, done right by their fans. However, their rival superhero universe, DC, has been struggling to keep up. And one of DC’s biggest regrets is the way they handled the treatment of Zack Snyder and his take on Justice League.
In a report initially ran by Variety, it was revealed that the big wig studio execs at DC and Warner Bros. are looking back on dropping the director’s infamous Justice League cut solely onto HBO and not in theaters. The way they see it, the straight-to-streamer release of Zack Snyder’s version of Justice League did little to quell his online fans who, as the article states, were made to be “only further entrenched… in opposition to the leadership at the studio in general and at DC in particular.” Ouch. When the fans turn against you, that’s when you know you’ve really done something bad.
But pass the popcorn, because the plot thickens. When it comes to Zack Snyder and his involvement in Justice League and the backlash that has become synonymous with it, it seems as though Warner Bros. thinks they’ve been bamboozled. According to a Rolling Stone piece published last month, the studio believes that the filmmaker was the one behind the #ReleasetheSnyderCut movement, hiring and creating a slew of bots to follow and share the hashtag and push it along. The report also reveals that the studio’s belief was that Snyder teamed up with Ray Fisher, who plays Cyborg in the superhero flick, to make Warner Bros. look like the bad guys. These are just allegations but pointed directly towards the internal workings over at WB.
To catch anyone out there unaware of the drama and feud between the Watchmen director and Warner Bros. up to speed, several circumstances led to Zack Snyder officially departing from his time at the helm of Justice League. The main decision came following the incredibly tragic death by suicide of one of the director’s eight children while he was in the final stages of production for the flick. This, combined with countless arguments and fights with the studio surrounding his vision and direction caused Snyder to throw his arms up and quit – even though he was so close to finishing that final cut.
After Zack Snyder left Justice League, Warner Bros. reached out to (at that time) beloved director Joss Whedon to put his stamp on their highly anticipated production. It was like starting from scratch, with WB pouring even more money into the project for reshoots and a complete change up of directorial vision between the two men. When the Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator’s version didn’t quite hit home with fans, (for several reasons) they began to rally around Snyder’s piece and requested that the studio release it.
The Army of the Dead director’s darker and more heavy-toned film would garner an incredibly deep following on social media, leading the studio to ultimately finish it and drop it onto HBO back in 2021. Titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the film satiated fans who wanted to see the beloved 300 director’s more serious movie. Since then, the drama following Zack Snyder and his Justice League has gone down in history as one of the most talked about feuds between a studio and a director, and, with this newest information coming out it would seem as though the rivalry is far from over.
