Zack Snyder wanted Justice League to be 2.5 hours, but it’s now 4

Murmure of a “Snyder Cut” of Justice League rippled through social media from the moment the 2017 version of theaters came and went. Zack Snyder was behind most of the hype and teased what his extended version might look like in everything from press rounds Batman v Superman: Ultimate Edition to his Vero account. His cut from the film, the real four hours long and full of story for Cyborg, Flash, Steppenwolf and even Darkseid, who are not even in the released Justice League. Like its heroes, the Snyder Cut has become a mythical entity – to be fully realized in the course of 2020 through the content-hungry HBO Max, a reported budget of $ 70 million and a half-year-long, pandemic time through various visuals effects local.

Zack Snyder’s four hour version of Justice League is now a real thing, available to constantly stream on HBO Max. But throughout the years of mythologizing and a hassle of bringing it to the small screen, one question remained: what would Snyder’s version look like if it appeared in theaters in 2017?

“We did not make a three-hour film,” producer Deborah Snyder told Polygon. ‘However, I think with Zack’s films we have a history of having a stage series, and then look Guards – we had two other versions of the movie on DVD, one of which was longer than three hours. ”

Lots of drama around Justice League concentrates on the aftermath of the director’s departure, when co-director Joss Whedon acted to revive the story – mostly by cutting away the character-oriented detours, as we now know, and resuming the film’s last industry . But the emergence of Justice League was just as tumultuous, and even now it’s hard to imagine what film Snyder could have sculpted from his original vision. Snyder has said in the past that the original concepts he co-wrote with Chris Terrio (Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker) was much darker than viewers got this week Zack Snyder’s Justice League. But write Justice League during post-production on Batman v Superman: Dawn of JusticeAs he prepared for the giant shoot in the immediate weeks after the polarizing release of the film, the epic sequel made it a challenge before a single frame was shot.

“It was a huge script, and it was a little different,” says Deborah Snyder. ‘I think we would have liked a two-and-a-half hour film, and the studio wanted a two-hour film at the time, which does not make as much sense if you have an entire Justice League team that you try to develop and compile. ”

The lukewarm reception to BvS the Warner Bros. asked to request changes in the grim writing that Zack Snyder and Terrio boiled up. But even then, the scope was huge – the film, says Deborah Snyder, shot for almost 140 days (and new scenes for the Snyder Cut only took three extra days). ‘So it was quite intense. I think that was a sign of the journey that this film would actually make for the audience. ‘

Zack Snyder dismissed the idea that the four-hour version of his movie was an “assembly,” or the roughest version of a finished film with very few editorial cuts. According to a tweet From December 2019, his event was almost five hours long. The four-hour version was the real vision – just not from the beginning. But with the luxury of infinite streaming space and a mythology revolving around the Snyder Cut, the strictest film was no longer the one to be delivered. Deborah Snyder says the arrival of HBO Max kept all the rules off the table.

“This is the best case scenario,” she says. ‘You can see it in its entirety, or you can see it in parts if you want to see it. [HBO Max] made it very easy to break on each of the parts so you can go back and look at your favorite things. It also just made it possible for this thing to happen. ”

So now a new question arises: Is there any part of Justice League left on the cutting room floor?

‘I do not think so!’ says the producer with a gleam of triumph. But this is not quite the movie they would make in 2017. During the production, their daughter would die of suicide, which increased the couple’s motivation to eventually step down from the shooting process. Over the years, the country itself would undergo massive upheaval. A Justice League Deborah, which was released in 2021, could not possibly be the same as one released in 2017, even if it was just the creation of Zack Snyder.

“The film resonates differently,” says Deborah Snyder. “Our loss and our journey also shaped the film. It has become a personal journey on so many levels. But if you look at the struggles that some of these characters are going through, and you look at the times in which we live now … I think it’s best if these characters are somehow a mirror of ourselves. We will not necessarily have these superpowers, but we can struggle with them. ‘