Zack Snyder's Justice League recently released on HBO Max at twice the length of the theatrical cut. Running four hours and separated into six chapters and an epilogue, the Snyder Cut is a far cry from the poorly-received original film taken over by Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer helmer Joss Whedon. However, die-hard fans may be surprised at the assumed Whedon flourishes that were Snyder all along.
The Snyder Cut is an anomaly in popular culture, a fan-led effort to restore a Frankenstein's Monster of a film back to the vision of its original director that came about due to Warner Bros. being in the difficult position of having a theatrical release calendar wrecked by coronavirus and a desperate need for original content for the upcoming HBO Max launch. Snyder shot 100% of principal photography, but after the tragic death of his daughter Autumn, he had to step away in May 2017 from the film's troubled post-production process. At the time, Warner Bros. thought Snyder's lengthy, dour, greyscaled film would continue to underperform like his previous DC films, at least compared to Marvel hits, and they were keen to hire someone to do a punch-up job on the film. Enter Joss Whedon, who added 80 pages to the script and handled reshoots, inserting more humor and quippiness and cutting down on the gloom and doom.
When the theatrical cut released on November 17th, 2017, the reception was poor, and the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign began almost instantaneously, charting a course that led to the cut's official announcement on May 20th, 2020. $70 million from HBO Max later, viewers can finally see Zack Snyder's intended vision for Justice League. However, even despite its massive differences (and improvements) from the Whedon cut, there are some surprising hold-overs perceived as Whedon additions that seem to have actually been part of Snyder's film from the beginning. Here are the most major examples.
The Conversation Water Bubbles
In 2017's Justice League, Jason Momoa's Aquaman and Amber Heard's Mera shared an underwater catch-up session after an attack on their kingdom of Atlantis by Steppenwolf. However, their means of communication (Mera conjuring a giant water bubble they could enter to share a conversation) was questioned by fans. Most chalked it up to Joss Whedon, who could've very easily used this device as a way to more affordably shoot an underwater dialogue scene, covering exposition hacked out of the theatrical cut. This assumption was compounded by the revelation that no such device exists in 2018's Aquaman, which lets its sub-aquatic subjects communicate openly.
However, the Snyder Cut sees this conversation remain relatively untouched, even adding another between Aquaman and Vulko, played by Willem Dafoe. That scene, like the one with Mera, also takes place in a bubble, confirming that this was always a Snyder conceit. Recently, the filmmaker has been public about his desire to come up with a more interesting underwater language for the film's Atlantis characters. Alas, there just wasn't the time, and thus the air bubbles were born.
Barry As A "Snack Hole"
Ezra Miller's Barry Allen, aka The Flash, was widely considered to be one of the primary subjects of Whedon's reshoots. His jokey, quippy style ("It's like a cave... like a bat cave") felt more like something out of the director's Avengers films, and a shoehorned way of inserting jokes into an otherwise dark and gloomy movie. Surprisingly, though, most of that jokiness is still intact in the Snyder Cut, including Allen's line about how his lightning-speed makes his metabolism so fast he's basically "a snack hole... a black hole for snacks."
Reportedly, Miller was encouraged to improvise even under Snyder's direction, and though the quippiness still feels a tad out of place in the director's Sturm und Drang vision, it no longer feels like the character is just a walking studio note. Surrounded by a more emotionally engaging arc, Ezra Miller's Flash no longer feels like a collection of surgically-applied zingers, but instead a living and breathing character who fits as a natural part of the Justice League, no matter how many snacks he consumes.
Bruce Buying The Bank
One of the most memed lines of Justice League comes near the end when Bruce Wayne saves Clark Kent's mother's farmhouse, which had been foreclosed by the bank. When Kent asks Wayne how he managed to save his family home, asking, "You bought the house?," Wayne answers with, "I bought the bank." It's a punchy button of a line that both flexes on the character's exorbitant wealth and also feels straight out of the Whedon playbook, but fans have long called it out as making very little sense.
If Wayne wanted to help, why wouldn't he just buy the farmhouse? Why would he feel it necessary to buy the entire bank? Why is Kent so confused? These questions and more need no longer be targeted solely at Whedon, as the scene remains alive and well in the Snyder Cut for fans to mercilessly meme until the end of time. Luckily, Diane Lane's increased presence as Martha Kent gives an added pathos to the conclusion of this arc, bringing the moment's meme status down to a respectable quip.
The Hall of Justice
Six days before the trailer for the Snyder Cut dropped, Zack Snyder shared on Twitter a photo of the set for the Hall of Justice, with the teasing text of "In 6 days..." This led some fans to speculate that they would be seeing a different version of the famous Justice League meeting place, a location teased at the end of the theatrical cut of Justice League as boasting a big round table with six chairs, "but room for more."
Alas, this scene plays almost entirely the same as it does in the Whedon cut, leading into a closing montage that teases a cinematic future for the Justice League that, as of yet, hasn't been seen. At the close of the four-hour odyssey that is the Snyder Cut, it's a rousing finale, and even if it disappoints fans to not see any sort of alternate introduction to this iconic location, there are plenty more teases of future plots and prospects in Snyder's extended Knightmare epilogue.
