JUSTICE LEAGUE Snyder Cut with $20 Million+ Budget Coming to HBO Max in 2021
It was very early on a Monday morning in November when director Zack Snyder and his wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, received a call from their agent. Let’s be a bit more precise. It was 7 a.m. But more importantly, it was the day after the second anniversary of the release of
Justice League, the DC superhero movie that Snyder was forced to exit due to a family emergency, which was then substantially reshot and retooled by replacement director Joss Whedon.
In the time since its release, something unusual happened: A growing movement of fans, rallied by the hashtag #ReleasetheSnyderCut, had called, agitated, petitioned — even bought a Times Square billboard and chartered a plane to fly a banner over Comic-Con — for Snyder’s version to be released. And on the film's second anniversary, the hashtag had
its biggest day ever — with even the movie's stars Gal Gadot and Ben Affleck adding their voices on Twitter.
So here, the morning after, was their agent saying that Toby Emmerich, chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures, was acknowledging the movement, and more importantly, was willing to accede. "This is real. People out there want it. Would you guys ever consider doing something?" was what Emmerich was asking, Zack Snyder recalls.
The answer to Emmerich's question, a whispered-about secret for months, was revealed Wednesday when Zack Snyder confirmed, at the end of an online screening of his 2013 movie,
Man of Steel, that his version of
Justice League was indeed real. And that it will be coming to HBO Max, the WarnerMedia digital streaming service launching May 27, and is expected to debut in 2021.
It is currently unclear what form Snyder’s
Justice League will take. Whether it will be released as an almost four-hour director’s cut or split into six "chapters" has yet to be decided, but the Snyders are now in the midst of reassembling much of their original postproduction crew to score, cut, add new and finish old visual effects, and, yes, maybe bring back many of the actors to record additional dialogue.
Also unclear is the cost of the endeavor. One source has pegged the effort in the $20 million range, although another source says that figure could be closer to $30 million. The parties involved had no comment.
"It will be an entirely new thing, and, especially talking to those who have seen the released movie, a new experience apart from that movie," Zack Snyder tells
The Hollywood Reporter, noting that, to this day, he has not watched the version released in theaters.
"You probably saw one-fourth of what I did," the director notes, basing his judgment on what has been shared with him of Whedon's version.
Before Emmerich came calling, adds Snyder, "I always thought it was a thing that in 20 years, maybe somebody would do a documentary and I could lend them the footage, little snippets of a cut no one has ever seen."
But, adds Deborah Snyder, "With the new platform and streaming services, you can have something like this. You can’t release something like this theatrically, but you could with a streaming service. It’s an opportunity that wasn’t there two years ago, to be honest."
It is a very unlikely development, and the latest twist for a movie that has, like the Man of Steel himself, seen death and rebirth.
Snyder was in a unique position when he shot
Justice League in 2016. Warner Bros. had entrusted its universe of DC characters to one filmmaker — him — and he had been building toward a great onscreen team-up, though not without some bumps in the road. He began with
Man of Steel, which grossed $668 million worldwide, then followed up with
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the 2016 blockbuster that polarized fans with its dark take on the iconic titular heroes and took in $873 million globally.
In January 2017, he had what he considered his optimal version of
Justice League, almost four hours long, although he knew it was something the studio would not release. Warners wanted a cut in the two-hour range, and he delivered a rough version with an approximate two-hour, 20-minute running time. That was the first cut the studio saw. Both sides agreed that there was much work still to be done before the November release, but tragedy struck the Snyders when their daughter, Autumn, died by suicide. A month and a half later, Zack officially
stepped away and Whedon was brought in.
League opened Nov. 17 to weak reviews and sluggish box office, eventually taking in $658 million worldwide. However, almost immediately a movement was born. Fans unhappy with the film created the now-infamous hashtag. A Change.org petition for Warners to release Snyder’s version had already garnered over 100,000 signatures less than five days after the movie’s release.
Forget that the version that fans wanted technically didn’t exist. What did exist was a semi-unfinished work, with no visual effects, no postproduction. One person who had seen that version described it like a car with no panels, just a drivetrain and some seats. And it sat on a hard drive in the Snyders' house. "When we left the movie, I just took the drive of the cut on it," says Zack Snyder. "I honestly never thought it would be anything."
It was on the two-year anniversary, however, that the zenith hit and the hashtag became a top worldwide trend. "#ReleasetheSnyderCut is the most-tweeted hashtag about a movie that WB has ever made, but it’s a movie they’ve never released," says Snyder. "It’s a weird stat but it’s cool."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h...lans-revealed-it-will-be-an-new-thing-1295102
