Zack Snyder’s Justice League Didn’t Leak Online By Accident

Just how did it happen that Zack Snyder's Justice League aired early?

By Faith McKay | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

Zack Snyder

Ten days before Zack Snyder’s Justice League was set to stream, an hour of the movie aired on HBO Max. Users clicked to watch the PG Tom and Jerry, and instead got the R-rated #SnyderCut. For fans, this was a magical moment. For people who wanted to watch Tom and Jerry, it was probably a minor inconvenience. While people largely focused on how great it was to see the first hour of the movie, others were left wondering how this even happened. Now, insider Mikey Sutton at Geekosity Mag is calling shenanigans.

The seasoned writer suggests that believing there was a glitch is too much of a stretch to believe. He heavily suggests that this was done on purpose, as another step toward quashing the momentum for Zack Snyder’s Justice League

So, how do we consider this? Well, how often do streaming services air the wrong thing? Knowing this may help us determine how unlikely this was to be an accident. When you try to search online for streamers airing the wrong thing, the incidents that come up are far between. When you research streaming service glitches, everything you find is about buffering and failure to let people in at all. For example, fans on the west coast couldn’t watch the WandaVision finale when it aired because the servers were overloaded. There are quite a few articles about how to deal with Hulu’s buffering issues. However, instances where you click on Netflix to watch Bridgerton and instead see Stranger Things don’t really happen. So how did they “accidentally” air Zack Snyder’s Justice League

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All WarnerMedia had to say about the leak of Zack Snyder’s Justice League was that they fixed it within minutes. The incident was brushed aside. Mikey Sutton of Geekosity Mag suggests that it’s a stretch to believe this happened on accident and that the context makes it harder to believe. He points out that around the same time that this happened, the J.J. Abrams reboot for Superman was announced. Was this a “look over here” distraction for DC fans? And now, after we have finally seen this new entry in the Snyderverse, Warner Bros. is saying that’s it. They have no more plans to make any movies with Zack Snyder, there is no Snyderverse, and they are excited to move on to their new projects. Ann Sarnoff from WarnerMedia was quite clear about this in her interview for Variety

While Zack Snyder has said he doesn’t want to make another comic book movie, and Warner Bros. is insisting that the Snyderverse won’t see another theatrical release, all rumors point toward the idea that maybe HBO Max will find a way to continue the Snyderverse moving forward. Fans remain hopeful. If they weren’t such a hopeful bunch, we never would have seen Zack Snyder’s Justice League in the first place.

While it’s clear that Warner Bros. only moved forward with The Snyder Cut because fans demanded it, it’s disheartening to consider that they leaked the movie on purpose as part of a plan to keep audiences from becoming too invested in the Snyderverse. A studio that wants to happily please their fans is a lot more appealing than one that wishes we’d see it their way.