Two years to the day since Justice League hit theaters (unfortunately, this may not be a coincidence) and still the rumor persists that director Zack Snyder somehow has a great cut of the film hidden away beneath his pile of stinky movie laundry.
To understand this outrageous talk of Snyder making a decent superhero movie, we have to go back a couple years and look at a tragedy unfortunately far worse than anything the director has put on screens.
Back in spring of 2017, Snyder was trying to finish work on Justice League as a way to distract himself from the recent suicide of his daughter—which, among all this playful mockery, we do not wish to mock at all. That’s seriously upsetting.
Anyway, so the story goes, by May, Snyder had realized he needed some time off with his family, and that’s supposedly what led Warner Bros. to bring Avengers writer-director Joss Whedon in to finish up Justice League.
Whedon’s entrance led to late re-writes, re-edits, re-shoots, and a mustache debacle, and the end result was not exactly great.
The quality wasn’t exactly surprising, given that Snyder last made Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but for whatever reason, some people that only seem to exist on the internet decided that Whedon was the problem. Though Whedon largely created the superhero team-up template that, despite its flaws, Warner Bros. was rightly seeking to emulate, these internet people decided that he was responsible for making this movie such a forgettable piece of crap.
Under the misguided notion that Zack Snyder always planned for—and quietly edited!—something better, #releasethesnydercut was born.
That painful hashtag and concept has long been left to the realm of Snyder himself and the groupies that think his Watchmen is a misunderstood masterpiece, not an utter misunderstanding of the material. But now, on this two year anniversary, the Justice League stars themselves have gotten in on the action of demanding this long-fabled tone-deaf edit.
On Sunday, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, and even Ben Affleck joined in with the nerd-bro chorus’s familiar anthem, “#releasethesnydercut.” Snyder himself said, “This ancient Amazonian can’t be wrong,” adding, “Neither can Batman.”
Of course, the choreography of this—and the fact that Ben Affleck is suddenly eager for people to remember him as Batman again—has led to some speculation as to if this is merely promoting a Snyder cut that indeed will hit screens, in some form or another. Warner’s HBO Max streaming service is launching soon, and many think this could be the dangling of a two-year-shriveled carrot in front of potential subscribers. Who could resist paying around $15 a month to continually watch a slightly different edit of a fairly poor superhero movie? After all, what if the Mommy Martha conundrum were to come up again and sort everything out?
Whether this is a marketing gimmick or not—and it almost certainly is—we at TV-VCR would like to join in on supporting it. Indeed, #releasethesnydercut. If this trash exists, open the lid to let everyone get a whiff. Maybe then someone will finally take it to the curb.
