Zack Snyder's Justice League advocates regularly spammed HBO Max's social media to get Warner Bros. to release the Snyder Cut. News broke this week that the long-awaited Snyder Cut would premiere on HBO Max on March 18. Snyder himself confirmed he finished the movie, and what at one point felt like a dream is now a reality.
The road to the Snyder Cut was long and winding but started with the critical and commercial failure of 2017's Justice League. Joss Whedon's reshoots were practically injections of a different movie, and the result was panned as a jumbled mess of competing visions. Immediately, Snyder's notoriously devoted fanbase began rumbling about a Snyder Cut. At the time, it was only an idea, as Snyder left before finishing, but the movement gathered momentum quickly, and apparently wasn't too far off the mark as a near-finished version existed as early as 2019. Though the actual existence of the Snyder Cut was still mostly unclear in 2018 and 2019, Snyder's fans were fueled by their own rumor mill and strategically placed hints from Snyder.
The Snyder Cut movement was, at its height, an unstoppable self-marketing machine that helped convince HBO to put down the money needed to finish it. That said, it's clear Snyder's fans had no mercy, and occasionally may have crossed the line. In an excerpt from Sean O'Connel's new book Release the Snyder Cut: The Crazy True Story Behind the Fight That Saved Zack Snyder's Justice League (via The Direct), Snyder a time when fans went after one of HBO Max's tweets about Sesame Street.
“Their websites, their Twitter, their everything ...they were paralyzed. They were literally paralyzed. They could make no release. They could talk about nothing. I was talking to an unnamed executive who said that [HBO Max] would tweet something about Sesame Street, and people would be like, 'F*** Elmo! Release the Snyder Cut!' That was the world they lived in. And they were like, 'Jesus Christ, what are we supposed to do? We can't function!' That's pretty rad.”
Snyder goes on in the chapter to recall how he used that fan outcry to prove his point about making his cut, and though it wasn't the deciding factor, it probably helped quite a bit. Snyder had, as he's since admitted, already shot more of his Justice League than he was supposed to, so it stands to reason that Warner eventually just caved. Much like the Sonic redesign, the Snyder Cut is a near-direct product of a studio giving in and listening to fans, except as opposed to being the butt of internet jokes, Warner was more the target of organized trolling. Warner Bros. insists that the movement had very little to do with it and that they had dismissed it as a "vocal minority", but freezing social media marketing is a significant and very disruptive feat.
All things considered, is that really "rad?" It's definitely impressive if nothing else. The Snyder cut will be the end of Zack Snyder's DCEU, and his involvement in DC movies, but that doesn't seem to bother the fans behind the Justice League Snyder Cut movement. It's always seemed more about giving Snyder his due, and that's been accomplished. Maybe now HBO Max can finally tweet about Elmo again.
Source: Sean O'Connel (via The Direct)
