Zack Snyder has an apparently inexhaustible collection of Justice League concept art and behind-the-scenes photos that he’s been posting online since the film’s release. Fans are always appreciative of this, and showing us what we missed out on with the butchered theatrical cut has kept the Snyder Cut dream alive. And now, he’s given us a look at his take on Ryan Choi/the Atom.
We’ve known for a while that Snyder had plans to introduce the Atom to the DCEU. He was intending to have the Ryan Choi character as the “Director of Nanotechnology” at S.T.A.R. Labs, seeing him take up the superhero mantle in one of the Justice League sequels. The actor here is Ryan Zheng, who seems to primarily appear in Chinese movies and TV shows under the name Kai Zheng. Given that he doesn’t look to have done much work in Hollywood before or since, it must have been particularly annoying for him to learn that he’d been cut from the film.
The Atom joins a group of other characters who were to be introduced in Justice League, but eventually ended up on the cutting room floor. The pic was to feature a tease for the Green Lanterns at one point (which can be glimpsed in one of the first trailers), while there was also to to be the reveal that Harry Lennix’s General Swanwick (first introduced in Man of Steel) was secretly Martian Manhunter in disguise. Then there’s the whole young Darkseid thing teased in concept art.
Somewhere out there is a parallel universe in which we’re excitedly chatting about how the DCEU’s Justice League is going to free Earth from Darkseid’s control in Justice League 3. But sadly, all we have to hope for here is that Zack Snyder’s cut of the film eventually sees some kind of release just so we know what we missed.
