March 18 is a four-hour rendition of director Zack Snyder’s original vision for Justice League will hit HBO Max.
Early reviews have mostly garnered praise for the film, calling it a win for fans of Snyder’s other superhero films (Batman v Superman, Man of steel). Others admit that it is, at least, better than the original film released in 2017, which was put together by Joss Whedon after Snyder had to withdraw from the project to deal with the sudden death of his daughter. Whether the movie meets people’s expectations or not, its existence – the marketing behind it, which it represents for fandom as a whole – is a turning point for online fandom.
A quick reminder of the past four years from different corners of the internet: after Justice League appeared in 2017, Snyder fans immediately included a petition in which Warner Bros. asked to release a replacement for the film – the true version they called the Snyder Cut. Over the years, calls that Warner Bros. grown into action, just like the fandom. Billboards in Times Square, bus ads in San Diego during Comic-Con, and small demonstrations outside Warner Bros. Burbank headquarters are all in an effort to put together WarnerMedia executives to release the version of Justice League they were promised by setups in Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, Wonder Woman, and more.
Like any massive faceless group focusing their online personas on one specific thing or person, the Snyder Cut fandom (or the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut collective, as they became known) was a mix of positive and negative. The positive aspects are inspiring. Together, the group raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise awareness about suicide, a case that is close to Snyder’s heart. A fandom rooted in a particular director has created a sincere social media campaign. This can not be denied.
It is also impossible to ignore the negative. Critics and reporters have received countless death threats and bad insults because they expressed their interest in a Snyder Cut or called Snyder’s other work bad. Warner Bros. and DC Comics executives such as Geoff Johns and Kevin Tsujihara, former CEO of Warner Bros., were paralyzed by Snyder fans to the point that Johns has apparently completely stopped using Twitter. When Warner Bros. new CEO Ann Sarnoff joined the company, her Twitter listings were full people claiming the Snyder Cut.
‘It took them a long time, the people who wanted to be really productive at the moment, to realize that they were going to be judged by [negative] actions too, ”said Sean O’Connell, a journalist and author of Release the Snyder Cut, a book setting out the campaign over the past four years, tells The edge. “The Snyder movement does not really have a strong hold on the police in the people who promote their negativity.”
Even with critics, academics, and journalists calling out the toxic parts of the fandom, there were some members of the group who seem only encouraged by continued recognition and less than subtle encouragement from Snyder himself. The director recently told The New York Times that “in some ways it is pleasant to navigate the wave of a cultural phenomenon,” adding that “in other ways it is frightening and terrible.”
Snyder Cut fans are far from the only fan base with a toxic cloud hanging over parts of it. Star Wars is a perfect example. The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, along with actors John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran, received hordes of bitter harassment Star Wars viewers. Boyega and Johnson publicly fought back against trolls, while Tran after some time decided to leave social media platforms like Instagram for her own mental health. At the time, managers of Lucasfilm did not say anything in public and neither did any of the officials Star Wars social media accounts.
One of the biggest changes in an internet-first, social media-dominant world, is that fans of massive properties are feeling closer to talent, executives and companies than ever before. In turn, companies are trying to figure out how to navigate extremely loud voices on increasingly global platforms. Universal leaned in the #JusticeForHan hashtag while marketing the upcoming F9, a popular movement movement. Sony has the overall tone for Poison after the first trailer could not get hype from Marvel fans. And perhaps most importantly, Paramount completely redesigned its CGI version of Sonic the Hedgehog after the first trailer led to immediate negative reaction from fans.
Parts of the Snyder Cut fandom showed direct comparisons to what happened to BioWare Mass effect 3 in 2012. After the game’s end of the game drew heavy criticism, BioWare issued an alternate end to try to smooth out a vocal part of the fan base. The DLC was named Mass effect: elongated cut, and it has become an example of companies giving in to pressure on social media.
“It’s such a slippery slope,” says O’Connell. ‘I do not think that studios and corporations are going to make decisions going forward to satisfy fans on social media, because that is a risky venture. At the same time, this whole DCEU experiment was reactionary to my detriment to the studio. They started chasing the Marvel model instead of just believing in everything that Nolan started and that Snyder was trying to continue. ”
AT&T has undoubtedly leaned most in the Snyder fandom, as it tries to attract more attention and subscribers to its new HBO Max streaming service. After years in which Warner Bros. repeatedly said nothing about the release of a version of the film in theaters, is the announcement of Snyder’s Justice League on HBO, Max joined AT & T’s official Twitter account celebrate a prickly fandom. That hasn’t stopped other Snyder fans from already responding to other AT&T tweets with a plea to #RestoreTheSnyderUniverse, demanding that the director get another chance to create his entire superhero world, something the current DC Films head Walter Hamada has no plans to do so.
According to several reviews, the Snyder Cut is much better than the original. This is proof that a director sees their whole project from start to finish. But #ReleaseTheSnyderCut is not the same as Zack Snyder Justice League, and there’s a reason WarnerMedia is releasing it as a four-hour movie with no supervision over HBO Max instead of releasing it back in theaters (even with the pandemic) and spending $ 100 million on marketing .
This is, as Snyder said The New York Times, a “social experiment.” The problem with an experiment is that no one knows what it means two years, five years or three decades from now. O’Connell does not believe this would have happened if Warner Bros. waited another year or HBO Max did not start. This is a moment to appease fans and send subscribers to a platform after which Jason Kilar, CEO of WarnerMedia, mentions the future of the company.
“This is the highlight of this whole experience: I fought and used the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, and it’s in my world, on my computer, on my TV, in my home,” Snyder said.
This is that of Zack Snyder Justice League. The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut fandom is not going to disappear all of a sudden, as my colleague Joshua Rivera wrote at Polygon. For both the positive fighters who are happy that Snyder’s version is finally available to watch, as well as the negative trolls who can win on social media and get on with people, they got what they wanted. Their tactics worked. One of the largest companies in the United States has conceded to claims from anonymous people. It is not something that people forget, and it only stimulates a very specific kind of action further.