It's time to talk about
Justice League, both the theatrical version and the Snyder cut. I more or less stand by what I said about
both versions, with the one major exception being that I no longer think the theatrical cut is better than BvS. So I'm really just going to talk a bit about the history behind both cuts of the movie based on my own experiences at the time. It's very easy to fall for the revisionist history that Snyder fans have been spreading about this movie. Many film critics have bought into the fiction, and at this point, I think Snyder fans have convinced even themselves of their alternate history.
When JL first hit theaters, Snyder fans stood firmly behind it. I was there, on both reddit and Twitter. Nobody was protesting the movie or Joss Whedon's involvement, nobody was threatening to boycott it, and nobody was talking about Snyder's vision being destroyed. At the time, Whedon was popular and respected, best known as the guy who had given us two very well-liked
Avengers movies. The story that WB had put out was that Snyder had taken some time off because of the horrific tragedy he and his family had just suffered, and that Whedon was just doing some pinch-hitting in his place. Backing this up was the fact that Snyder ended up being the sole credited director. I'm sure Snyder fans would preferred their guy to do the whole movie, but of course nobody was going to begrudge him leaving the movie so he could grieve. That was the situation when the movie first dropped. The narrative was set in stone - this was a Snyder movie that just had some help from Whedon. Snyder fans rallied around the movie and claimed it as their guy's, and it flopped. It didn't simply underperform or not do so well, by the way,
it outright bombed. It wasn't until
years later that Ray Fisher led the charge of the film's cast railing against Whedon and what he did to the movie, and it also wasn't until much later that Snyder and one or two other people behind the scenes began openly speaking out about the changes. I'm dwelling on this point a lot because I really do think Snyder fans want people to believe that all these things were happening at the same time and that's why JL flopped in theaters. The timeline shows that's not the case. Snyder had tarnished the brand with BvS, and so there was little interest in JL.
Incidentally, I also noticed in the months after the theatrical cut's release, when Snyder fans really did start complaining about how Whedon had ruined what they were sure was a great movie, they didn't always correctly recognize what was Snyder's work and what was Whedon's. It wasn't too hard to tell them apart when the characters of Batman and Superman were on screen, given that Whedon's Batman looked noticeably bloated and exhausted and Whedon's Superman had a CGI upper lip, but they struggled other times. I distinctly remember at least once on reddit seeing a bunch of Snyder fans agree that Diana's introductory scene must have been entirely Whedon's work, what with the silly shot of Diana on Lady Justice's arm, her awkward expositing of what her lasso does, and the weird group of well-dressed terrorists who wanted to kill people because of reasons. It wasn't until the Snyder cut came out that it was confirmed that nope, it was a Snyder scene to begin with, and had simply been edited for time and to tone down the violence in the theatrical cut. That's just an anecdote, of course, and shouldn't really be treated as serious evidence of any broad trends or anything, but I still think it's funny enough to be worth mentioning.
That being said, though, I'm not going to claim that Snyder fans' intuition that something was wrong was entirely off-base. Even though the DGA didn't give Whedon a director's credit, his shadow looms heavily over the theatrical cut. The existing footage was heavily edited, recolored, and in general reworked to fit with Whedon's aesthetic rather than Snyder's, Whedon reshot a number of scenes so he could insert a quip or joke into them (more on these jokes in a moment), and of course, there were the additional scenes that Whedon wrote and shot himself. Again, I don't believe this had any real impact on the movie's commercial performance, as I don't believe that Snyder is particularly well-known to general audiences, but Snyder fans - along with weirdos like me who aren't fans but still follow his career for some inexplicable reason - could see that the movie had been broadly Whedonized, so to speak, even if they weren't always right about what was originally Whedon's work and what had simply been distorted by Whedon. A Snyder fan hoping for a Snyder movie would be disappointed by the theatrical cut.
Whedon's reputation and legacy have been severely damaged over the last several years by both allegations of abuse and predatory behavior going back decades and a broader, more general backlash against the quippy style of writing he pioneered that quickly became the dominant "voice" of the MCU and has since spread all over the entertainment industry. But setting that aside, I can honestly say that I stand by the opinion I had of Whedon's contributions to the movie back when I first saw the theatrical cut - they are garbage. I strongly disagree with Crudblud's assertion that "a good many of the quips one might have expected to drip from the pen of Joss Whedon were Snyder’s own." Sure, there were some dumb jokes in the Snyder cut, but the worst, most infuriating ones were absolutely Whedon's, especially every line that comes out Barry Allen's mouth. It's incredible how Whedon was able to magnify Ezra Miller's natural obnoxiousness many times over through his writing. The quips he wrote for Batman, while less obnoxious than the ones he wrote for Barry, suggest a fundamental lack of understanding of Batman as a character. No version of Batman in the world, not even the two (one?) from the Schumacher movies, is this much of a fucking cornball. Outside of the quips, there are a few scenes that Whedon came up with entirely on his own, like a waste of time focusing on some random-ass Russian family, an unfunny scene where Barry and Cyborg slowly dig up Superman's body, a pointless scene where Batman fights a random burglar, and another useless scene where Bruce confronts Diana and makes himself look like a giant asshole. Whedon is capable of much better writing than this, and for whatever reason, he half-assed this movie. It's arguably the lowest creative point of his entire career.
Okay, so I agree that Whedon's contributions to the movie were dogshit and that the theatrical cut wasn't a proper representation of Snyder's artistic vision. Does this mean I count this as a victory of art over commerce, an example of the good guys winning for once? It's tough for me to give a straight answer to this question, because I can't separate this movie from Snyder's career as a whole. Snyder has been treated for his entire career as though he has the golden touch. Every single movie that he's directed has been a blockbuster with a huge budget that he's been more or less entirely free to filter through his own very distinctive directorial style. And the last time he had a unqualified commercial success with no reservations (he's never had a
critical success, needless to say) was the movie
300, released all the way back in 2006. I'm willing to accept that he earned himself some wiggle room with Hollywood for that one. But how many failures was that one big success really worth?
Watchmen flopped. That weird owl movie did okay at best.
Sucker Punch flopped. And as a result of this misplaced faith in his ability to deliver, Snyder's career naturally suffered. No, wait, that's not what happened. Snyder actually got a promotion of sorts. He was given the even more valuable IP of Superman and continued to enjoy his usual full artistic freedom. How did that happen?
My theory, which of course I can't prove, is that Snyder's good buddy Christopher Nolan went to bat for him and convinced WB (who had originally wanted him to direct MoS) to trust Snyder with the IP. It makes sense, given Nolan's hands-on involvement with MoS and close friendship with Snyder, and I can't think of any other reason why WB would let a director with two recent, expensive box-office bombs to his name take control of the one of the biggest names in capeshit than a powerful friend intervening on his behalf. As they say, it's not what you know, but who you know. As for the movie itself, while a commercial success, MoS didn't do as well as the higher-ups in WB had hoped, and was extremely polarizing, getting mixed reviews at best. I wouldn't have considered it a good start for a new shared universe to compete with the MCU, nor as a successful test run for its director to prove that he could be trusted to take charge of their entire universe, including their most valuable IP of all, Batman himself. But WB evidently disagreed, and so we got BvS. And I've already spent plenty of time talking about this, but while there were signs of competing interests and producer notes with MoS (although it was still recognizably its director's movie in a way that relatively few blockbusters are, both then and now), BvS was 100% an auteur movie. This was Snyder's vision. No board of directors or producers ordered him to make that movie the way he did. So when BvS bombed critically, failed to crack a billion at the box office, and worst of all, severely tarnished the brand for years to come, Snyder was absolutely to blame.
I want to make it clear that this Snyder's rock-star treatment is not the norm when it comes to Hollywood. There are very, very few "blockbuster auteurs," or directors who are more or less given an entirely free hand and allowed to do whatever they want with big-budget tentpole movies. Nolan is certainly one of them. Denis Villeneuve is another. There's also Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Ridley Scott, and James Gunn. Two fairly recent additions to this list would be Matt Reeves and Greta Gerwig, who interestingly have come at it from opposite directions - Reeves was a journeyman blockbuster director who's now become an auteur, while Gerwig was an auteur who's now moved on to blockbusters. I can't really think of anyone else, and bear in mind that I'm not simply listing famous directors who are known for making blockbusters. There are plenty of famous directors with successful blockbusters to their name - Sam Raimi and Tim Burton are two examples that come to mind - who don't get the same kind of
carte blanche that Snyder and the other directors listed above do. And the big difference between those directors and Snyder is that their movies consistently do well at the box office, and even when they don't, at least usually get good reviews.
The reason I've spent this time summarizing Snyder's career successes, or lack thereof, is to establish context for what was going on when JL was filming. Everyone loves a story of art triumphing over commerce, but there's a parallel narrative to the release of the Snyder cut that I would say features in it even more strongly - the vindication of Snyder. The proof that he was right and WB was wrong, and by extension, the proof that WB stifled his creative vision. And this narrative is complete bullshit, as I think I've shown by now. Snyder has been treated as if he's a successful blockbuster auteur on par with Nolan and the others for his entire career. JL was the first (and so far, only) time a studio ever interfered with his vision to a major degree. We got to see his unfiltered creative vision many, many times, and it was one that critics and audiences rejected on every single occasion, or at least since
300. Why, ethically speaking, did WB somehow "owe" Snyder yet another opportunity to burn their money and tarnish their brand at the box office? There are a hundred thousand directors in Hollywood right now who'd love a chance to make a big-budget movie their own way for once, and yet they're never part of this discussion about artists' rights. Why is Snyder so special?
I'm convinced that all this historical revisionism and myth-making about Snyder being a poor starving artist instead of a privileged, well-connected guy with several major failures to his name played a huge role in the Snyder cut's eventual critical reception. I don't like to read ulterior motives or insincerity into reviews that I disagree with, but that really does seem like the most likely scenario. Reviewers pulled their punches, perhaps unconsciously, because they were so eager to celebrate the victory of art over commerce. But the Snyder cut is still a Snyder movie. Nothing has changed about the way he makes movies. It's more competently put together than MoS, BvS, and the theatrical cut (which I also think contributed to its positive reviews, in much the same way that
Revenge of the Sith, despite being a terrible movie, got good reviews because it made improvements on the previous two SW prequels and almost looked good in comparison), but I don't believe for a second that the same critics who disliked most of Snyder's previous movies genuinely liked this one. If Snyder had never stepped down from directing JL and this was the movie (presumably trimmed for length) that appeared in theaters instead of Whedon's cut, it would have been critically panned, and it would have bombed just as spectacularly at the box office, because BvS had tarnished the brand and destroyed audience interest in these characters - at least these versions of these characters.
Perhaps the worst thing the release-the-Snyder-cut movement has done is rejuvenate Snyder's career. Shortly after the release of the Snyder cut, Netflix, which had presumably been tricked by the movement into thinking that Snyder was widely popular and universally beloved, gave him
a generous deal where he would once again get to make enormous, expensive blockbusters with full creative control. The results speak for themselves - the
Rebel Moon movies were complete disasters, among the worst of Snyder's filmography, and despite all their talk of building an expansive universe, we've heard nothing about the series' continuation. I bet Netflix almost certainly regrets making this deal with Snyder now, but regardless of whether or not they continue to work together, I don't think that Snyder's career is at an end. He'll probably pick up another lucrative deal to yet again make blockbusters with a free hand at another studio, and sure enough, it'll be yet another shitty movie that doesn't make money. Maybe it'll take Nolan asking for favors for his good buddy again, or maybe Snyder's weirdo fanbase will once again trick studios into thinking that he's totally in demand, but either way, I'm sorry to say that I think Snyder will continue to make awful movies that don't do well until either he dies or he willingly retires. If he hasn't been blackballed by the industry by now, he never will be.
As I've said before, it might seem awfully mean-spirited of me to wish ill upon the career of a man who by all accounts is a really nice guy and isn't doing anyone any harm. If film studios want to keep giving Snyder chance after chance to make movies, who am I to complain? I don't work for any of these companies or hold stock in them, so it's really none of my business, right? To this, I would say that, first of all, I'm interested as someone who watches movies. I would like to see good directors make more movies and bad directors make fewer movies. But in a broader sense - and I'm aware of how pretentious this sounds - I feel like I'm standing up for the people who work in or would one day like to work in Hollywood who don't have the privilege or connections of people like Snyder. As I've said before, we don't live in a perfect world with unlimited resources, and only a select few people are able to make high-profile movies at any given time. The opportunities that Snyder gets must come at the expense of other people. How many better directors than Snyder, with better track records and better ideas for movies, have been turned down by studios even as Snyder, a man whose (very expensive) movies consistently fail both critically and commercially, continues to be given chance after chance? You would think that the most important thing to studios would be money, right? But apparently it isn't, because otherwise they wouldn't keep squandering huge budgets and valuable IP on someone whom any disinterested observer can tell is a losing horse.
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