With the overwhelming success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s no surprise that DC comics wanted in on the movie business. DC Comics has already released a few cinematic movies, with some of them doing quite a bit better than others.
Really most of the DC movies are very hit or miss with some being either anywhere from good to alright to others being just plain bad from a movie standpoint. You take your chances like a pull at the slot machines at Grande Vegas online casino.
This isn’t saying Marvel is better than DC in any way, just that Marvel happens to make better movies.
When DC decided to do their version of the first Avengers movie, dubbed the Justice League, they originally hired Zack Snyder. Snyder is known for making the Man of Steel Superman movie, which is the movie that started off the DC cinematic universe along with Batman vs Superman, the sequel to Man of Steel.
The Justice League’s Production
When Zack Snyder was originally hired he had a plan for the entire Justice League movie. This plan didn’t really work with what the rest executives at the studio wanted but they still let him make his movie, as he had been successful with his other DC movies so far.
When filming for the movie was almost done Snyder stepped down from his position as a director due to his daughter passing away. After this, his role as director and main writer for the film was taken over by Joss Whedon.
Joss Whedon was originally working with Snyder back when he was the main director and writer as a co-writer for the film. This wasn’t the first movie Whedon has directed though, he has quite a few quite big hits under his belt, which makes the way that the original cut of the Justice League movie turned out even more surprising.
These include classic television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, and Firefly along with award-winning movies like Toy Story, the Avengers, and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Whedon has worked on a lot of projects and the majority of them turn out good, although there are frequent cases of him being accused of harassment towards actors and people involved in the project.
Jose Molina, another writer that worked on the TV show Firefly, goes as far as to say that Whedon’s sense of humor revolves around being mean. He would allegedly find making female writers cry while working particularly hysterical and often told a story about a time he was able to get a woman to cry twice in the same notes reading session.
Contradictory to these accusations against Whedon, he himself views himself as a very strong feminist.
He talks about how he consistently writes in strong female leads into most of the projects he works on and has given long talks on feminism and other things related to it.
After Whedon took over full control of the Snyder cut the executives on the film started putting a lot more pressure onto him than they did on Snyder when he was in charge.
They forced him to make large changes to the script of the film because of problems they decided were in it.
The large ones included forcing him to cut the run time down from the more than three-hour film Zack Snyder was planning to just an hour and a half film as they decided was more the industry standard at the time.
Also, they forced him to rewrite larges parts of the film to be funnier and more cheerful contrary to Snyders vision of a more dreary, down-to-earth kind of superhero film that’s more in tune with what the DC comics are like.
This probably had to do with films like Thor Ragnarok being released while the film was in production. Thor Ragnarok was an outstanding box office success while leaning on the edge of being a comedy.
With the success of it, it’s no surprise that higher-up executives would want to copy anything that’s making money regardless of if it’s a good idea or not.
With such executive pressuring it’s not really a surprise that the film didn’t do that well. Executives and producers for films have a bad record of drastically lowering a movie’s quality if they start to get very involved with a film’s production.
The Snyder Cut’s Production
After the movie’s lackluster release and reception and after information about the production of the movie released there started being a movement to release the film as Snyder originally intended, dubbed the Snyder Cut.
There was even a trending hashtag for it “#ReleaseTheSnyderCut” and an online petition for it that got more than 180,000 signatures.
This was before people even knew that a cut of the movie as Snyder intended it actually existed in some form.
The movement for getting the Justice League movie re-released as Snyder intended it didn’t stop there though, there was a massive social media campaign, billboards bought along with four minutes of ad time during the FA cup.
It took multiple years and actions by fans that were practically harassment but Zack Snyder was brought back to redo parts of the film and re-release it in his original vision.
The original cast was brought back and large parts of the movie were re-shot along with almost all of the special effects being redone in their entirety.
It cost a total of 70 million dollars to finish the now four-hour-long film. This was not in vain though, as the new cut and release already have reviews and ratings much higher than the previous film.
As for how much the new movie made we don’t know since the film released directly to HBO max instead of theaters because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe in the coming months, the studio will release some number related to that but until then we really can’t know.
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