Zack Snyder rehashes 'Justice League' drama ahead of HBO Max release
Zack Snyder's Justice League will finally see the light of day on March 18, but Snyder didn't wait until then to tell his side of the story as to why it has taken this long to see a version that he actually made.
While the 2017 Justice League film technically lists Snyder as its director—his wife, Deborah, also served as producer—a new Vanity Fair profile by Anthony Breznican confirmed that Snyder has never actually watched the movie. Snyder left behind his duties in May 2017 due to a dispute with Warner Bros. and a family tragedy. Below is a telling excerpt from the deep-dive:
"In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. 'It was just…it’s a weird experience,' she says now. 'I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.'
"What happened to Justice League was a crisis of infinite doubt: a team of executives who lost faith in the architect of their faltering comic book movie empire, and a director in the midst of a family tragedy that sapped him of the will to fight. Joss Whedon, a director from another universe, the Marvel Cinematic one, left the Avengers after two movies and crossed over to comics rival DC, picking up Justice League not where Snyder left off, but remaking it significantly with extensive rewrites and hurried reshoots, just as the studio demanded."
Snyder shared the first official trailer for next month's HBO Max installment earlier this month:
That was preceded by a first glimpse at Jared Leto reprising his role as the Joker from Suicide Squad (2016):
Leto's involvement is just one example of why this HBO Max project was important to Snyder. The 54-year-old told Breznican that it cost somewhere around $70 million "to undo Whedon's redo," but he was not compensated for the remake. To him, finally being able to maintain creative control from beginning to end superseded all factors.
Snyder has other projects to look forward to outside of the DC universe, as he teased Sunday that Army of the Dead will hit Netflix on May 21.
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