Warner Bros.
Ever since Justice League came out in 2017 to less-than-stellar reviews, fans have been clamoring for what they believe to be the “Zack Snyder cut” of the film – which may or may not exist depending on who you ask.
Because of how poorly Batman v Superman had done under director Zack Snyder and because Snyder had to leave the film during post-production to deal with the death of his daughter, Joss Whedon, the writer and director of The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron was brought in to clean things up.
And by clean things up, Whedon made some major changes to the script and the tone of the film as the Justice League that Snyder had created was reportedly “unwatchable.”
Turns out that the version of the Justice League movie Snyder was making at the time wasn’t even his original idea, he revealed at a Q&A this week, reports Flickering Myth.
“Chris Terrio and I had finished the script to Justice League before BvS came out,” said Snyder during a Q&A following a screening of the Batman v Superman Ultimate Edition. “Some people didn’t like the movie. A vocal minority. So they said ‘there’s a lot of stuff we don’t want you to do’ so we did a rewrite from that script. The original Justice League that Chris and I wrote, we didn’t even shoot. The actual idea, the hard, hard idea, the scary idea, we never filmed because the studio was like ‘That’s crazy.’”
“It’s a long story,” Snyder continued. “The truth is that, the Knightmare sequence in [Batman v Superman] was always my idea that all of that would eventually be explained … and that we would end up in the distant future, where Darkseid has taken over Earth and where Superman has succumbed to the Anti-Life Equation. There was a few members of the Justice League that had survived in that world, that they were fighting.”
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Snyder went on to reveal that his original plan was to have the Justice League – and in particular, Batman – tasked with protecting Lois Lane from Darkseid, However, the intrepid Daily Planet reporter would ultimately have been killed by the villain, leading to the post-apocalyptic world we glimpsed in Batman v Superman. The heroes would then embark on an Avengers: Endgame-style quest to undo the devastation by sending The Flash back in time to prevent Lois’ death.
Wow.
I so want to see that version of the movie now.
At the same event, Syfy Wire reports that during a Q&A following a screening of Watchmen, Snyder also went off on fans for worrying about whether Batman kills people or not.
“Someone says to me, ‘Batman killed a guy.’ I’m like, ‘F**k, really? Wake the f**k up,’ I guess that’s what I’m saying,” Snyder explained. “Once you’ve lost your virginity to this f**king movie and then you come and say to me something about like ‘My superhero wouldn’t do that,’ I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ I’m like down the f**king road on that. It’s a cool point of view to be like ‘My heroes are still innocent. My heroes didn’t f**king lie to America. My heroes didn’t embezzle money from their corporations. My heroes didn’t commit any atrocities.’ That’s cool. But you’re living in a f**king dream world.”
Snyder also addressed the infamous “Martha” scene in Batman v Superman (via Screen Rant’s Stephen Colbert)…
“It’s funny, because we, [screenwriter] Chris Terrio and I, we did reach that point in the movie, in our discussions… we knew how to get them to fight, right? But how do you get them to stop fighting? That’s a tough one. And we sort of were just throwing down on their humanity and Batman realizes Superman has humanity, he’s not just a creature, he’s a man — he’s an alien, but he is as human as, in a lot of ways, he’s more human than him, right? He’s sort of embraced all the good parts of the human race, and so Batman’s able to sort of see, in a lot of ways, a thing that he is not. And I think that that was how we started to talk about it… Then we started to talk about how it could work, and if it was Lois (Amy Adams) that said it, maybe it’s better, it’s that kind of thing. Look, it’s a mythological construct, I have no problem with that part of it.”
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Ummm… maybe Snyder ending up being removed from the final production of Justice League wasn’t such a terrible thing after all.