The road to Zack Snyder’s Justice League has been a long and weird one, starting almost immediately after the release of 2017’s Justice League. After years of fans asking for Warner Bros. to "release the Snyder cut," the film finally hits HBO Max today. This over-four-hour release from Zack Snyder is the director’s ultimate plan for the film, yet originally, it was announced that Warner Bros. would release this cut of the film as a four-part movie.
In an interview with Deadline, Snyder talked about the shift from four one-hour installments into one large film, saying:
"Frankly, I think that there was some legal rumbling about the dividing up of a movie into four parts, and does it become a TV show, and does it void all the contracts. And I was like, look, guys, I don’t want to become…this sounds like we’re going to get in the weeds on this, and it’s a disaster, so let’s just not make legal precedent out of this movie, and I’ll just stick to my four-hour opus."
In order to finish his version of the film, Snyder did three days of reshoots and added additional VFX work. None of the footage that was shot by Joss Whedon is included in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and despite the reshoots, only a few minutes of extra footage was shot for this new take.
While Snyder states that his version of Justice League includes a cliffhanger ending that was imagined to set two more Darkseid Invasion films, Snyder was told by Warner Bros. that his version is non-canon. Even though Snyder says the plan was to make two more Justice League films that came from his film, it looks like any theoretical sequels will be to the theatrical cut, not Snyder’s cut. But after years of anticipation, viewers can finally now see Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max, and compare and contrast this new version to the original theatrical release.
Zack Snyder's Justice League is now streaming on HBO Max.