Zack Snyder Under Heavy Fire After Controversial Report About Justice League
Zack Snyder is having serious allegations levied against him about the online movement that got his magnum opus made.
Zack Snyder is one of the more polarizing major filmmakers in the world right now. Where critics tend to dismiss his movies as overly serious given their subject matter and borderline Ayn Randian, his fan base is one of the more devoted and questionably fanatical out there. According to a very dramatic new report, Zack Snyder’s legendarily online fans might be a little less grassroots than is thought. The director is being accused of having essentially engineered his own support movement and leveraging them against Warner Bros in order to get his cut of Justice League made.
According to this bombshell report from Rolling Stone, Zack Snyder was behind the online movement to get the so-called “Snyder Cut” of Justice League made. The original film is alleged to have been referred to as “unwatchable” and “joyless;” a family tragedy caused Zack Snyder to step away from the production of the film in May of 2017. Infamously, Avengers director and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon was brought in to complete the film, resulting in a poorly received movie and still-ongoing allegations of toxic, abusive behavior onset. In the aftermath of the release of the film, online fans began campaigning for the release of a fabled “Snyder Cut” of the film. However, the film as originally envisioned by Zack Snyder actually required significant reshoots, so it was not simply a matter of releasing an alternate cut of the film. It required Warner Bros to step up to provide another $70 million in funding, which only happened as a result of the allegedly Zack Snyder-orchestrated movement.
The Rolling Stone report claims many anonymous insiders and sources witnessed threatening behavior from Zack Snyder in order to get his version of Justice League made. It also claims that he himself was behind multiple bot-driven campaigns in support of his project and that a disproportionate number of fan accounts calling for the release of his cut of the film were fake accounts (estimated to be 12-13% in total). The report is quite damning of Zack Snyder in general, also alleging that he covertly paid for public advertisements (including plane advertisements and billboards) and tacitly supported the more extreme elements of his fan base. According to Rolling Stone, Warner Bros actually commissioned an internal report investigating the potential danger of Zack Snyder fans online towards Warner Bros employees.
For his part, Zack Snyder comprehensively denies the allegations made by Rolling Stone and their anonymous sources. The director has since left Warner Bros (where he was once a key figure in their attempt to create a DC Comics-based shared universe of films to compete with Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe) and is currently working with Netflix. Zack Snyder is in production on a science fiction film titled Rebel Moon, which apparently began as a long-ago pitch as a Star Wars movie and was reconfigured as a standalone film. We will have to see whether these allegations against Zack Snyder have any effect on his future with Netflix.
