The executives over at Warner Bros. are having regrets about bringing director Zack Snyder back to complete his four-hour cut of Justice League, which cost the studio an extra $70 million to complete because a completed version of his film did not already exist.
The only reason that WB let this happen was because of the years-long campaign to release the “Snyder Cut,” which is also shrouded in controversy as Snyder has been accused of weaponizing the fans to make this happen. WB started to question and wonder how organic Snyder’s Twitter army was, so they hired two investigative cybersecurity firms to look into it. There were two reports submitted, and they found that the massive online support for the Snyder Cut movement was fueled, in part, by bots and inauthentic social media accounts. You can read all about that here.
According to Variety, the studio feels that “Zack Snyder’s Justice League never should’ve happened.” The report goes on to say, “Rather than quiet the unceasing online campaigning to #ReleasetheSnyderCut, the four-hour HBO Max feature only further entrenched the vocal and extremely online ‘Snyderverse’ fanbase in opposition to the leadership at the studio in general and at DC in particular.”
It’s explained, “That group may be hard to win over, but DC has to do a better job of cultivating the kind of compelling franchises that will enable them to build up the kind of passionate, engaged and excited fanbase that can drown out the haters. That takes patience, which has often been in short supply at DC where corporate overlords have long made it clear that they want their own in-house rival to the MCU, but have failed to understand the kind of blood, sweat and tears it can take to build that kind of juggernaut.”
WB has a long road ahead of them when it comes to the DC franchise, and now we’ll just have to wait and see if this new studio leadership being led by CEO David Zazlav, will actually be able to pull it off.
Snyder has since found a new creative home at Netflix, where he’s currently developing his next film Rebel Moon. When talking about the DC Snyderverse last year, the director said: “I would hope that anything Snyderverseian is [whatever] we’re doing as original IP. The DC universe is something that’s very close to my heart and something I spent a lot of time developing and thinking about, so I love it. But where I am right now is with the Rebel Moon of it all and the Army of the Dead of it all. They’re very much consuming our creative output. Hopefully, just anything that we’re doing that’s original and cool would fit into that category.”
So Snyder is doing fine, and it sounds like he’s happy with where he’s at in his career.