The near-mythological Snyder Cut of 2017’s Justice League is creeping ever closer, like a parademon preparing the Earth for Darkseid’s arrival. The four-hour miniseries hits HBO Max next year, with original director Zack Snyder back at the helm assembling a new cut of the film that will represent his true vision for the first cinematic outing of the iconic superhero team. The Snyder Cut will include new effects, alternate takes, a new villain, a whole other storyline involving Superman and his black regenerative suit, and some bonafide new footage. But how much new footage will there be? The short answer is, not much.
Snyder recently appeared on Beyond the Trailer to talk about the highly anticipated project, and revealed that despite the much-touted news of stars Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, and Ray Fisher returning to film additional scenes, the total length of new footage is going to be less than a standard commercial break.
“I will say that in the end it’s going to probably be about four minutes or five minutes of additional photography for the entire movie,” Snyder said. “In the four hours that is Justice League, maybe four minutes.”
That is… surprising. Considering how much money is being spent on this project (unconfirmed reports have the budget for the additional photography and post production in the area of $70 million) and the fact that both Jared Leto and Joe Manganiello were brought in to reprise the Joker and Deathstroke respectively, the news that the grand total of new footage is so miniscule compared to the total length of Snyder’s miniseries is wild. That’s maybe enough time for one or two actually substantive scenes beefing up the story, with Leto’s Joker driving by in the background waving and shouting “It’s me, the Joker!” out his window. What I’m saying is it’s safe to assume that both villains will be little more than cameos, and that, like we at Collider have always suspected, Snyder’s version of Justice League isn’t really going to be all that different from the movie we’ve already seen. That said, it will hopefully be a better version of it, because that theatrical cut was a legendary mess. Click here to watch Henry Cavill emphatically state that he was not shooting new footage for The Snyder Cut, which I am including here for no particular reason.