Zack Snyder almost picked a strange hill to die on, as the saying goes, since he nearly quit the Justice League movie when he wasn’t allowed to film the final scene with Green Lantern as he initially planned on. The final scene in the Snyder Cut that shows Martian Manhunter dropping in on Bruce Wayne after the Knightmare scene that turned out to be a nightmare was supposed to feature John Stewart as one of the Green Lanterns, but the studio nixed that idea since Warner Bros. is planning on releasing a Green Lantern Corps series eventually, and it’s likely that they didn’t want Snyder mucking around with the idea in a way that might mess up the continuity. The thing is, Snyder filmed it anyway and nearly quit when the studio asked him to take it out. Obviously that didn’t happen since he ended up using Martian Manhunter instead. But one has to wonder at the ego of Snyder at this point since he was already told by the studio to avoid doing something. It could be that he was hoping that his attempt would be so overwhelmingly good that the studio would lighten up and just approve it. The sad part of this is that someone must have told Snyder that he had a free pass to do what he wanted whenever he felt like it, or perhaps he felt that it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Whatever the case, this is what he had to say about the matter as per MovieWeb:
“The last scene with Martian Manhunter, originally, I had shot it in England. And the dialogue was very similar, but it was supposed to be one of the Lanterns… And then the studio had told me I wasn’t allowed to shoot anything. That there would be no film made of any kind. During production, that was a thing they insisted on. And I shot stuff anyway, of course, in my yard. And one of the things I shot was the Green Lantern scene. And then they asked me, when they saw the movie and saw that I put it in there, they’d take it out. I said that I would quit if they tried to take [the scene with Green Lantern] out. And I felt bad. The truth is I didn’t want the fans to not have a movie, just based on that one stand that I was going to take… And the Green Lantern was John Stewart. And that was part of it too. I was like, I don’t want to take a person of color out of this movie. I’m not going to do it. And, but then, but I felt like having Harry Lennix’s Martian Manhunter at the end was, that was okay.”
Did anyone else frown a bit when Snyder admitted to not wanting to take a person of color out of the movie, especially considering that a person of color was one of the main characters that got a great deal of screen time in the movie? Virtue signaling has become one of the norms of today’s cinematic experience and to be fair, seeing more representation of POC’s is all well in good in the movies, but being worried about cutting anyone out of a movie because of their skin color is as close to being an apologist as one can get, and it’s not exactly something that instills a lot of faith in Snyder’s decision-making process. If a character makes sense in a movie then it’s likely that they should be included. But if the people that are in charge of the job say no, it’s time to listen instead of simply pushing ahead to see if one can get away with it. If not for the many people that ranted, whined, cried, and pleaded for the Snyder Cut, which no, still wasn’t worth the wait, it’s likely that Snyder would have up and quit the movie and went on his merry way. People might not want to hear this, but it wouldn’t have been that big of a loss since the Snyder Cut ended up being a 4-hour long expository story that had brief moments of action and was essentially a beefed-up version of Joss Whedon’s attempt, though the toxic and diehard fans won’t acknowledge this since for some of them even uttering the name Joss Whedon is not unlike a betrayal of their beloved director Zack Snyder.
As of now many people are still happily defending the Snyder Cut because of the number of people that signed in to watch it. Whether people want to hear this or not, the fact is that the numbers are every bit as deceptive as they are at the box office, since no matter how many people pay to see the movie, seeing it is only half the process. Liking it is a different story.
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