Zack Snyder is talking about his Justice League movie again as he recently sat down with Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame directors The Russo Bros. on their show Pizza Film School. While talking to them, he offered a little more insight into the process he went through developing the movie with Warner Bros. and how he was initially developing something darker and weirder, but the studio wanted it to be funnier.
While Snyder and The Russos were discussing their writing process for the films they make, they all agreed they prefer the process of puzzle-style notecards on a wall. Those notes shift and move as they “find” the actual story and sequences of the film they end up making. It’s at this point that Snyder brought up Justice League saying:
“And so the script for Justice League did evolve out of that [process]. Now I’ll be honest that when the script – what happened with Justice League is that we had a very… The original script was darker and weirder. And then when Batman vs Superman came out, and the studio was like ‘It’s not funny enough! People want funnier movies! They want funny stuff!’ We did go back and do a big kind of… lightened the movie overall. And I would say that my cut of Justice League is a sort of… is in between.
“I always preserved some of the more intense stuff that I shot anyway, [that] I thought, in retrospect, they would want anyway – making sure of course had what was on the page, but we had this other script. I think in the original script Lois and Batman got together you know briefly – there was this whole other thing that everyone was like ‘Oh my god, you can’t do that.’ [laughs]. Because Superman’s dead, and I was like ‘Lois is a pretty amazing person. Yeah, so…”
We all know what happened with the project during production. It seems like Snyder and the studio never managed to get on the same page, and he was ultimately replaced by Joss Whedon after a series of unfortunate events. Years later after all the drama faded away Snyder got to release a four-hour cut of his film, but his initial pitch was to turn it into a six-episode series! But that idea ended up being shut down.
Snyder explained: “Originally, we had talked about doing [Zack Snyder’s Justice League] as six parts released separately, but then there were some legal rules.…” He then joked, “Everyone was like, ‘Ahhh, don’t do that!'”
In the end, Snyder got to share his vision of Justice League, the fans got their Snyder Cut, and for the most part, everyone was happy with the outcome. Snyder had a good run with DC, but he’s moved on and he has no plans on returning to the DC Universe.
It just sounds like working with WB on these DC films was an awful experience for him.