Ever since the disastrous release of the DCEU’s ill-fated Justice League late last year, what few fans of the franchise remain have refused to come to terms with the fact that the franchise, taken as a whole, is a dud. The mega-franchise is not the long-anticipated rival to Marvel’s cinematic universe. It’s not a proper successor to the Nolan movies. Hell, it’s not even on par with the Adam West series.
The DCEU, in short, is a mess. Despite all the good will and doubtful benefits that its name, stars and cultural cache have provided it with, it has failed to retain, let alone create, an audience for its grimdark and hopelessly depressive narrative.
Man of Steel sharply divided fans and critics alike with its controversial reimagining of Superman — the iconic symbol of truth, justice and the American way — into an existential sadsack who will thoughtlessly kill his enemies and level his urban homestead without so much as a thought for the collateral damage he’s causing. Batman v Superman was one of the most staggeringly inept blockbusters of the past decade: failing on virtually every level of conception, design and execution. Suicide Squad was somehow even worse than that. Wonder Woman was admittedly great, but it has the same perfunctory third act issues that plagued most of the Phase 1 Marvel movies.
And then, of course, there was Justice League: perhaps the most mismanaged blockbuster property in the long and storied history of Hollywood. I won’t go into the full details here — details that have been thoroughly elaborated upon by me in previous articles over the past year or more — but suffice it to say that Justice League is equally born of the grimdark aesthetic that Snyder spear-headed in Man of Steel, tries to forcibly course-correct from Dawn of Justice that merely lampshades everything terrible that it inherited from that movie, and then had a longer and more troubled production that virtually any other blockbuster in history: up to and including replacing the director in post-production, eleventh hour reshoots that reworked at least half the movie and a truncated post budget production that could never hope to cover the costs of the multi-hundred million dollar superhero crossover.
And yet, through it all, die-hard Snyder-ites have insisted that the movie’s core was still good. If it wasn’t for Warner Bros interfering with the product at the last minute, if it wasn’t for Joss Whedon compromising Snyder’s singular vision for the film, if it wasn’t for (and people actually believe this, mind you) Disney bribing critics all over the world in order to tank the movie’s aggregate rating and drive people away from it opening weekend, it would have unquestionably been a masterpiece.
Thus was born the endless clamor for a so-called ‘Snyder Cut’ of the film: a print of the movie that restored all of the original footage that Warner Bros let rot on the cutting room floor after ordering reshoot after reshoot before it made its way into theaters. The ‘movement’ has gained fairly sizable traction, at least as far as these things go. Fans have lead protests, signed petitions and flooded social media with calls to “release the Snyder cut.”
The real question people should be asking, though, isn’t “where is the Snyder Cut,” but “why would anybody want to see it in the first place?”
I don’t trust Warner Bros for much, but they’ve managed to stay in the movie-making business for so long at least in part because of their ability to sell viable entertainment products to masses more than willing to pay for a good time. And while there are invariably duds in their roster, they would have folded up shop decades ago if they didn’t manage to succeed more often than they failed.
And, in that capacity, it’s fair to trust Warner Bros that the first cut of Justice League, the so-called ‘Snyder Cut,’ was unwatchable dreck that they could not reasonably release to theaters and expect to make a return off of. These are the same people who figured that Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad were worth distributing to theaters the world over. What kind of fresh Hell would this Lovecraftian nightmare be, that they didn’t feel confident in turning loose and instead opted to pay millions more to almost completely reshoot and still get pummeled at the box office?
So, no, I don’t want to see the ‘Snyder Cut’ of Justice League. If Joss Whedon couldn’t save this turkey of a franchise, I don’t think anybody could have.
Follow Us
