Kevin Smith Teases Green Lantern And Darkseid In Justice League Snyder Cut

Kevin Smith is well-known for his love of superhero culture and comic books in general, and his status as a popular filmmaker with friends in high places gives him access to a lot of information that isn’t readily available to other people. While he recently had to clarify that he didn’t have the inside scoop on Daredevil’s rumored involvement in the MCU’s Spider-Man 3, he has offered an update on Zack Snyder’s fabled original vision for Justice League.

The Snyder Cut is the story that just won’t go away, and if Joss Whedon’s reshoots on the beleaguered project had resulted in rave critical reviews and huge box office numbers, then we most likely wouldn’t be talking about it at all. However, the theatrical version was clearly the result of having to stitch together the work of two tonally-different filmmakers into a movie that was mandated by the studio to run for no more than two hours, and the huge wave of backlash from fans ultimately saw DC and Warner Bros. reshape their entire creative outlook for the DCEU.

Justice League was initially announced to be followed by a sequel that would arrive eighteen months later, presumably to pay off many of the plot points and story threads that Snyder was planning to establish in the first installment. Smith hinted as much in a recent interview as well, revealing that a member of the effects team had told him Darkseid and the Green Lantern Corps were set to factor heavily into the director’s plans.

“He saw Martian Manhunter on it. He said he saw Green Lanterns, and stuff like that. He broke down the script that he got to read. The movie that they shot originally, and then the movie that we saw. That’s when I first heard about what we would call the Snyder Cut. From people that worked on the movie, special effects people, they were like, ‘Dude, Darkseid was in it. This was in it…’. They went through everything.”

Snyder has already confirmed that Harry Lennix’s Calvin Swanwick was Martian Manhunter in disguise, while the entire Darkseid subplot was dropped entirely, and the only mention of any Green Lanterns were a brief glimpse during Justice League‘s opening battle. Of course, the Snyder Cut is reportedly back in play for HBO Max if the streaming service fails to meet initial targets, but at this point, the studio may as well hand over the cash to get it finished, because it looks like support for it isn’t going anywhere for a long time yet.