The first teaser trailer for The Snyder Cut of Justice League has been released online, ahead of the film’s release on HBO Max next year. The Snyder Cut is, of course, director Zack Snyder’s preferred cut of the superhero team-up movie that was released in theaters in 2018. Snyder entered production on Justice League before his Man of Steel follow-up Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice hit theaters, and when BvS was met with some strong negative reaction, Warner Bros. got cold feet and worked to lighten up Justice League on the fly. That included adding a host of new scenes in reshoots, which Joss Whedon wrote and oversaw following Snyder’s exit from the film due to a personal tragedy.

Fans have long asked for Snyder’s cut of the movie to be released, but that posed a tricky prospect for WB given that he never actually finished his cut of the movie before leaving. Now, however, Warner Bros. has agreed to give Snyder the funds necessary to complete The Snyder Cut with added visual effects and likely ADR from the cast members, after which The Snyder Cut of Justice League will be released directly on the streaming service HBO Max.

This short teaser uses dialogue from BvS spoken by Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor and basically confirms that the villain of Snyder's version of Justice League was Darkseid, and he'll be reinstated in The Snyder Cut. We watch Gal Gadot as she looks on an ancient painting of the otherworldly villain, and then we see footage from that flashback battle explaining the Motherboxes only instead of bland old Steppenwolf, the Big Bad is Darkseid.

Indeed, Snyder originally envisioned Justice League as a two-part story that would bring Darkseid fully into the fold, so it'll be interesting to see how much of that overall story is restored in The Snyder Cut and whether it could lead to another sequel. After the box office disaster of Justice League, Warner Bros. basically cut ties with the interconnected DCEU that Snyder was building and greenlit a series of films that go in different directions. So moving forward with Snyder's overall JL plans would be rather complicated, and would impact films that are already filming/completed but not yet released like The Batman (in which Robert Pattinson takes over the role) and James Gunn's The Suicide Squad.

Snyder says in the tweet to expect more reveals at the upcoming virtual DC fan event DC FanDome, so mark your calendars for August. The Snyder Cut of Justice League will be released on HBO Max in 2021.