Just last week it was confirmed that Zack Snyder's cut of Justice League, also known as The Snyder Cut, would be coming to HBO Max in 2021. While this was cause for celebration for many fans of both Sndyer and the WB / DC movie, it's not as simple as the WarnerMedia streaming service (which launches tomorrow, Wednesday, May 27th) checking a box on a playlist to make Zack Snyder's Justice League available. The "Cut" will need to be finished and assembled, to the tune of $20 to $30 million and roughly a year's worth of time in an increasingly difficult era of production and post-production. So what does that next year look like and how did The Snyder Cut come to be in the first place?

In an interview with Business Insider, HBO Max Content Chief Kevin Reilly talked about the discussions for The Snyder Cut, how long they were in talks, and what it was that finally pushed the conversation past the finish line. There aren't a lot of details here, and they likely won't ever fully come out, but Reilly does confirm what most have suspected, that the Cut would only ever come about if a ton of legal issues were sorted out well in advance of any actual deals to move ahead with production. After that, well, it's all business as usual.

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Image via Warner Bros.

Here's what Reilly said:

I forget when Zack and Deborah [Snyder] first gave us the sense of where they were heading, but even from that meeting, me and my team felt it was something we really wanted to do. There were a lot of issues involved to figure out how we could deliver on his vision, and a myriad of legal issues. We've been sitting on this for quite some time but working on it. It was obviously a secret project given the high level of interest, but we were chipping away at it piece by piece. There was some strategy but also some serendipity in how we got over the hurdle of some of those issues just before the launch [of Max].

As for what "some of those issues" were, Reilly says:

That's a whole separate interview [laughs]. Let's file that as a follow up.

For more of our coverage of all things The Snyder Cut, Zack Snyder, and Justice League, check out these recent write-ups: